Quantbase is excited to have secured $500k in pre-seed funding to make high-risk investing easy, through automated portfolios for everything high-risk, with buttoned-up quant hedge fund strategies on one end and crypto indices on the other, peppered with mass appeal strategies like the Nancy Pelosi tracker and Inverse Cramer index.
The round included participation from Witz Ventures (founded by Christian Blackwell and finance content creator Austin Hankwitz, with over 600k followers), Dorm Room Fund, Trolley Ventures, Soleil Capitale, YC alumni, and Thirdline Capital head Larry Eiben, among many others, representing founders, influencers, retail investors, and crypto natives.
Part of the new funding will be used to extend Quantbase’s crypto portfolio offering, letting us go toe-to-toe with full-scale retail platforms like Vanguard. We aim to standardize the alternative space — which includes crypto and NFTs, but also assets like wine and non-assets like prediction markets — in the same way Vanguard has helped standardize the traditional finance world.
Our Investors
We want to recognize the tremendous buy-in we’ve received from our community of friends and investors. A few highlights of the folks that are going to help us win:
Witz Ventures: we’re incredibly excited to be working with Austin and Christian. Austin’s online presence as a FinTok content creator has earned him almost a million followers across platforms, and the pair have used that success into gaining a huge edge in the creator economy. We’re working with them to bring investment management into that world — some of our funds, like the Pelosi Tracker and Inverse Cramer Index, serve as our foothold into making investing viral.
Dorm Room Fund: DRF is our pipeline to college students and alumni. Their extensive portfolio of almost 300 companies includes several unicorns, many of whom we’re already working with in order to make high risk investing accessible to early/mid 20-somethings who are looking to take on short-term volatility for long-term growth potential.
Soleil Capitale: Soleil are a global company with a broker-dealer and bank, and serve as our pipeline to the traditional investment world. Quantbase, at its core, is bridging the gap between modern instruments/asset classes and the demand for them, and traditional financial infrastructure — partnering with Soleil lets us leapfrog into tradfi, and the access to capital that brings.
Our Team
Quantbase, currently headquartered on Wall St, was founded in 2021 by Thomas Stewart (serial founder with multiple exits under his belt) and Som Mohapatra (quant trader and portfolio manager), who first met at the University of Virginia.
Thomas: “We actually met in an entrepreneurship group that had been started in early 2021. I’d gotten a lot of initial signals from Hacker News and Reddit, where I hang out, and Som was taking his classes pass-fail to focus on building a stock exchange for financializing opinion. We met, realized it was a perfect fit after a few weeks of working together, and have been going strong since.”
The founders are young — Stewart a recent grad, and Mohapatra on leave from university — but have proven their prowess and wit. Prior to beginning their fundraise, Quantbase amassed a waitlist of 5,000 users, soft committing $70M in assets under management — about $16.1k committed per user.
Our Company
Part of this new funding will go towards product development. The company’s ferocious, talented engineering team has a number of accolades, including senior software engineers with almost a decade building full-stack consumer products at Google and Amazon, automation engineers at leading insurtech firms, and engineers and advisors at fintech firms like Chime, Robinhood, and OpenSea, as well as at firms Citadel and Goldman Sachs.
We’re an SEC-registered investment advisor, and carving out a niche in the high-risk space.
Som: “We’re finding that, even though there’s demand, very few advisors/firms in the traditional investment space are willing to even talk high-risk, let alone make it easily investable. And on the other side, alternative investments like DeFi and retail leveraged algo-trading are all about the acceptance of short term volatility for long term, super-sized growth. There’s value in bridging this gap, and it’s exactly the value we’re looking to provide.”
The long-term vision for Quantbase is huge. We are tackling the next $20–40T in the next wave of alternative and high-risk assets, as they go from niche assets with media coverage that far outclasses AUM, to accepted members of a well-hedged portfolio. Quantbase aims to make high-risk not just definable, but standardized and investable across the board. The site is live at getquantbase.com.
What’s Next?
Quantbase’s live product launched in early February to 200 users and $100,000 in AUM. We’re growing incredibly fast weekly, and planning on onboarding a set of industry-leading crypto funds within the next few weeks.
Quantbase is also rolling out smart quantitative strategies that range anywhere from leveraged algo-trading to tracking (and inversing) Jim Cramer’s stock picks. We recognize that investing has changed in the past decade, and we’re looking to
- bring the quantitative tilt that has been a facet of all institutional investing for decades, to everyday consumers
- Make it interesting
Lastly, we’re always looking to work and partner with the best. Whether you’re interested in turning obscure economic papers into rules-based investable strategies, or want to help us create the world’s first index fund for sports betting, reach out with your ideas at hello@getquantbase.com. We’re always hiring :)
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