Technology · co-founded 2021
iQuant Fund: the AI trading technology business Adrian Campbell co-founded
A group of traders tired of staring at screens all night asked whether software could make the repetitive decisions for them. iQuant Fund was the answer they built.
Where it came from
iQuant Fund Ltd was founded in February 2021 by Adrian Campbell and Jason Noorman. Adrian served as its Chairman. The seed of it was planted years earlier in Hong Kong, where Adrian had co-founded Alan Masters, a subscription service publishing technical analysis of cryptocurrency pairs, from 2016 to 2017. That business, run through the first great run-up in crypto prices, convinced him that the repetitive part of trading, scanning markets and applying rules, should be done by software rather than tired people.
In a 2024 interview with Kanebridge News he described the problem bluntly: traders juggling multiple screens, analysing vast amounts of data and spending countless hours away from their families. The goal was a system that could automate those strategies and hand the hours back.
What it built
The company built machine-learning models for systematic equity research and trading. The models combined machine learning with Modern Portfolio Theory, the framework for weighing return against risk across a diversified portfolio, to produce momentum signals, identify market regimes, whether a market is trending, ranging or volatile, and run portfolio diagnostics across more than 20 exchanges and around 5,000 equities. It began with the ASX and extended to the NASDAQ, NYSE and Hong Kong.
iQuant was enrolled in AWS Activate and Nvidia Inception, programmes that give early-stage technology companies cloud credits and GPU access, which provided the capacity needed to train the models. It served institutional clients only, such as family offices, allocators and proprietary trading teams, and never retail investors.
Funding and coverage
The company announced the completion of a Series A funding round in August 2024, reported by The Globe and Mail and The AI Insider among others. The amount was not disclosed. Kanebridge Quarterly ran a print feature on the business, "The Evolution of iQuant.fund", and interviewed Adrian as its Chairman. His advice in that piece, to focus on innovation and never stop learning, is about as close as he comes to a motto. The pieces are listed on the press page.
What carried over
Adrian is not a programmer and says so. His contribution is the business around the software: who it is for, what problem it solves and how it is funded. The same instinct, pulling scattered data into one place and letting software do the matching, is the foundation of Kinnara, the property marketplace he founded the same year. Kinnara aggregates listings from 76 portals the way iQuant aggregated signals from 20 exchanges.
This page describes a company's history. It makes no claims about investment performance and is not financial advice.