The AI trader era begins in finance

THE DEFAULT playbook for an AI startup is to build the model once and sell it many times. Apoorva Mehta, the Instacart co-founder, is doing the opposite. His firm, Abundance, launched on April 24th from a Palo Alto office with ten people and $100m in seed equity. It is a hedge fund where thousands of AI agents scan markets, research companies, pick stocks, size bets and execute trades with minimal human involvement. The launch note puts the posture plainly: "We don't intend to sell or license this technology. We plan to use it ourselves."

The firm was seeded nine months ago after the release of OpenAI's o3, which convinced Mr Mehta's team that generative agents could handle what he calls "consequential decisions, even capital allocation decisions." Since then the fund has traded its own capital in public equities, long and short, with what Mr Mehta says are returns above multiple indexes (he declined to specify which). Citadel's Ken Griffin argued late last year that generative AI was not yet helping hedge funds beat the market. Abundance, in effect, is a bet that Mr Griffin is wrong — and that the most lucrative response to being right is to sell no one the answer.