Quantopian

Quantopian was a Boston-based fintech company founded in 2011 by John Fawcett and Jean Bredeche that operated a crowd-sourced algorithmic trading platform, allowing freelance quantitative analysts to develop, backtest, and deploy investment algorithms using Python-based tools including its open-source backtesting engine Zipline. The platform hosted a two-sided marketplace connecting algorithm developers with institutional investors, including a $250M allocation commitment from Steven Cohen's Point72 Asset Management in 2016. Quantopian raised approximately $48.8M from investors including Spark Capital, Khosla Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Point72 Ventures, and Andreessen Horowitz, and grew to over 210,000 community members by 2018. The company shut down in November 2020 after returning investor capital due to underperformance of its investment strategies, with co-founders and much of the team subsequently joining Robinhood.