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About nof1
Nof1 is an AI research lab focused on financial markets. Its core project, Alpha Arena, lets several leading large language models (LLMs) trade crypto perpetual futures on Hyperliquid with real capital. Each model receives $10,000 and makes autonomous decisions without human intervention, including opening/closing positions and setting leverage. The experiment aims to observe AI behavior in real market conditions, rather than static benchmarks.
Its core strength lies in using real markets as a testing ground, providing real execution, real fees, and real counterparties, thereby exposing the actual performance of AI decision-making. The market pain point is that traditional AI evaluation relies on static datasets, which fail to reflect the dynamism and complexity of the real world; financial decisions require transparency, yet AI decision processes are often opaque. Alpha Arena provides an auditable evaluation framework by recording every trading decision and rationale.
In the past six months, Nof1 completed the first season of experiments, finding significant differences among models in risk appetite, planning, and directional bias, but also common issues such as overtrading and poor risk management. Most models performed poorly and incurred losses. Additionally, models lacked explicit awareness of market regimes and had no access to historical trading records, limiting their adaptability. Based on these findings, Nof1 plans to introduce more features, improve the prompt and harness, and add statistical rigor in Season 2 to more systematically evaluate AI capabilities.
Nof1, an AI research lab focused on financial markets, launched Alpha Arena, a live benchmark where frontier LLMs (GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, etc.) each received $10,000 to trade on Hyperliquid with zero human intervention. Across 32 result sets, models posted profits only six times, with one 'Mystery Model' later achieving a 12.11% return while Grok 4 suffered heavy losses. These results underscored that current models lack purpose-built training for real-world trading.
Nof1 later closed a $15 million funding round co-led by SUI Group and Karatage, with SUI Group investing $3 million. The funding supports Nof1's next phase: developing its own base models trained via open-ended learning and large-scale RL on market data, equipped with web search and extended reasoning. Plans include Season 2 and a consumer platform for market-specific coding agents.
The long-term significance lies in shifting AI evaluation from static benchmarks to adaptive, real-world environments. By treating financial markets as a self-hardening testbed, Nof1 aims to create open-ended AI systems that continually improve, potentially surpassing human and algorithmic traders.
In May 2026, Nof1 announced a $15M funding round co-led by SUI Group and Karatage Opportunities, with SUI Group investing $3M and also strategically investing in Recursive Superintelligence (valued at over $4B), focusing on agentic finance and self-improving AI.
For Alpha Arena, after completing Season 1.5, Nof1 is advancing Season 2: its own models will feature web search, extended reasoning time, and multi-step execution for autonomous decision-making in live markets.
According to the official roadmap, a consumer platform will launch after Season 2, offering the first coding agents for markets. Nof1 continues using financial markets as a training ground, combining open-ended learning and large-scale RL to build self-improving systems that aim to surpass human and algorithmic traders.
Co-founders and current core executives:
Matthew Siper: Co-founder & CTO, AI Research Scientist. Formerly a software engineer at Citadel, senior quantitative researcher at GOC LP, senior data scientist at DataDock Solutions, AVP programmer at Bank of America, and independent quant trading system developer. Holds a PhD in Computer Science from NYU.
Jay Azhang: Founder. Previously co-founded EverArt, founded Rise (a single-GP liquid fund returning 6x), co-founded Krue, served as lead quantitative analyst at Vitol Group and exotic options quant at JPMorgan Chase. Graduated from Rice University.
Aaron Wheeler: Lead Engineer.
Julian Togelius: Head of AI.