NUMERAI RAISES $11M WITH ICO & PREPARES TO LAUNCH PREDICTION MARKETPLACE

In an initial coin offering (ICO) Numerai, the US-based prediction market start-up and artificial intelligence hedge fund, has raised $11 million to launch its Erasure project.

A blockchain and cryptographic token-based ecosystem, Numerai was launched late in 2016, and is designed to incentivise anonymous data scientists to construct predictive models of markets, and give traders access to the latest developments in machine learning.

The company claims that, because Numerai abstracts its financial data, data scientists do not know what the data represents, and so inherent human biases and overfitting are overcome.

Numeraire tokens are based on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain, and are used in trading the predictive models on the company’s platform. Erasure is the decentralised unit of the marketplace.

According to Coindesk, Richard Craib, founder of Numerai, said the recently raised funds will largely be used to hire more engineers for Erasure, which is slate for launch later this year.

He explained that the Ethereum-based marketplace will enable users to sell their predictions to investment funds in the public network,  via the peer-to-peer InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), and connect their crypto wallets directly to it.

Though most of Numerai’s prediction models are currently dealing with traditional assets, Craib said that when Erasure is launched, it will enable predictive models of any asset to be traded.

Investors in the ICO round included VC and private equity firm Placeholder, and Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam’s crypto investment company Paradigm. Existing investors and advisors in Numerai including Howard Morgan, Co-Founder of Renaissance Technologies and First Round Capital, Juan Benet, Founder of Protocol Labs (IPFS and Filecoin), Ash Fontana, Board Member at Kaggle, Joey Krug, Thiel Fellow and co-founder of Augur, Peter Diamandis, Founder of Singularity University and the IBM Watson AI XPRIZE, Olaf Carlson-Wee, Founder of Polychain Capital, and Union Square Ventures, Founded by Fred Wilson.

The positive ICO resulted int the Numeraire token rising sharply, being up almost 25% to $6.83 USD at the time of writing. The token is carried on Bittrex, UPbit, Poloniex, DDEX, and IDEX and has a market capitalisation of some $7.7m.

AYO.NEWS says:

Using AI and machine learning to remove human biases and overfitting from data analysis is leading to increasingly sophisticated, and much evidence suggests, more accurate predictions. It seems inevitable that, as the technological and market infrastructure for such predictive science develops and becomes more accessible, it will be harnessed for other fields, like predicting social and environmental trends and even sports betting – and that could be very bad news for bookies in the long run!