Richard Craib

Founder & CEO Numerai

Last Reviewed: September 24, 2026

Executive Summary

Richard Craib is the founder and CEO of Numerai, a San Francisco hedge fund that doesn’t write its own trading models. Instead it hands out obfuscated, hedge-fund-quality data free of charge. Thousands of anonymous data scientists build models on that data and submit predictions, and those predictions are combined into a single “meta model” that trades global equities. Contributors stake the company’s Numeraire (NMR) token on their predictions, so they are paid when they are right and lose their stake when they are wrong. Craib studied mathematics at Cornell and founded Numerai in 2015. By the time of its November 2025 Series C at a $500 million valuation, it managed several hundred million dollars, with capacity of up to $500 million committed by J.P. Morgan.

Career Highlights

• Founded Numerai in 2015 and remains its Founder & CEO, per the company’s February 2026 NumerCon report.
• Raised a first venture round in 2016 led by Union Square Ventures, with backing from Renaissance Technologies co-founder Howard Morgan.
• Launched the Numeraire (NMR) token in February 2017 to align contributors’ incentives with the fund’s performance.
• Secured up to $500 million of fund capacity from J.P. Morgan in 2025.
• Raised a $30 million Series C in November 2025, led by university endowments, at a $500 million valuation, five times the 2023 figure.
• Grew assets under management to roughly $700 million by the company’s August 2026 update.

Professional Journey

Craib is South African. He studied mathematics at Cornell University and then worked at an asset management firm in South Africa. Numerai is built against a habit of that industry: quantitative funds guard their data and models, so each one draws on only the talent it can hire.

He founded Numerai in San Francisco in 2015. The founding idea was to reverse the usual secrecy. Numerai gives its data away, transformed so that data scientists can build machine-learning models on it without being able to see what the underlying securities are. It then pays for the predictions that work. Early payouts were in bitcoin. By late 2016 the fund had been trading for a year, and it had closed its first venture round, led by Union Square Ventures with $3 million and another $3 million from other investors, including Renaissance Technologies co-founder Howard Morgan.

In February 2017 he introduced Numeraire, a token that contributors stake on their own predictions. His argument was that a payment alone rewards anyone who submits something, whereas a stake rewards only predictions that turn out to be good, which pushes thousands of competing modellers toward helping the shared model rather than gaming it. A game-theory academic quoted by WIRED at the time called the design overly complicated. It has nonetheless stayed central to the business, and the company’s 2026 updates cover NMR buybacks and on-chain staking infrastructure.

The fund’s growth came later. In 2025 J.P. Morgan committed up to $500 million in capacity. In November 2025 Numerai raised a $30 million Series C led by university endowments at a $500 million valuation, with Union Square Ventures, Shine Capital and Paul Tudor Jones also participating. At its NumerCon event in February 2026, Craib renamed the flagship fund from Numerai One to Numerai Sigil, alongside Numerai Supreme and a new fund, Numerai Singularity. He described the coming decade as one in which autonomous agents, not individual humans, run the research loops that generate, stake and refine predictions. By August 2026 the company was reporting assets under management of about $700 million.

Education

Cornell University

Mathematics (per WIRED, 2016; degree type not stated).