Nof1

About Nof1

Nof1 is an artificial intelligence research lab focused on developing frontier AI models for financial markets. Founded in 2023 by Jay Azhang, the New York-based company aims to pioneer agent-based investing by creating AI that can trade autonomously and generate alpha in live market environments. The leadership team includes entrepreneurs and researchers with backgrounds from prominent organizations like DeepMind and Renaissance Technologies. The company gained significant attention for its flagship experiment, Alpha Arena, a live benchmark designed to test the capabilities of leading large language models (LLMs) in real-market trading. In its initial seasons, Nof1 provided AI models from major labs like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic with real capital to trade crypto assets and derivatives autonomously. These experiments, which attracted over 50 million views on social media, demonstrated that current frontier models require purpose-built infrastructure to trade effectively, validating Nof1's core thesis. Nof1's approach is to use financial markets as the ultimate training ground for AI, believing them to be a more complex and dynamic environment than games for advancing AI capabilities. The lab utilizes techniques such as open-ended learning and large-scale reinforcement learning to build base models that can self-improve and create their own training data. In May 2026, Nof1 announced a $15 million funding round co-led by SUI Group Holdings and Karatage Opportunities, a London-based hedge fund. Following its research phase, Nof1 plans to develop its own proprietary models and launch a consumer platform featuring the first coding agents for markets, which will allow users to leverage its advanced AI for trading.