Horizon Trade raises $2M pre-seed to open systematic trading to everyone
What's the deal? Horizon TradeDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, founded by 19-year-old Tuvia Ohana, has raised a $2 million pre-seed round led by Entrée Capital. The startup is building an AI platform that lets investors describe a trading idea in plain language, test it against historical market data, and deploy it automatically across brokers and exchanges.
What's the endgame? For decades, systematic investing — using data, algorithms, and automated strategies — has been the domain of hedge funds with quantitative researchers and specialised engineers. Horizon uses AI agents to strip out that technical complexity, generating the underlying code, backtesting a strategy across years of data, and analysing risk before users go live.
Why now? More than 23,000 traders have joined the platform's waitlist ahead of launch. Users can connect to brokers including Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, Alpaca, E*Trade, and TradeStation, and the company plans a marketplace for traders to share strategies.
The pitch is that Horizon uses the same strategy code for both backtesting and live execution, reducing the risk that a strategy behaves differently in real trading. The product aims to sit between two flawed options: general AI chatbots that cannot reliably test ideas against historical data, and trading platforms' own tools that focus on execution rather than strategy design.
Who's behind it? Ohana finished high school at 16 and bootstrapped a company before starting Horizon. Its 15-person team has an average age of around 20, with entrepreneurial and cybersecurity backgrounds.
What could go wrong? Trust is the hurdle. As Ohana put it, "Building a chatbot with some market data is one thing. Building the infrastructure investors can trust with real capital is something else entirely."
The signal: At $2 million, the round sits in roughly the 43rd percentile for deals of its kind — a modest cheque for an ambitious bet that AI can hand retail traders tools once reserved for professionals. Entrée Capital's Avi Eyal said Horizon "has abstracted the complexity of systematic trading so a first-time investor and a professional portfolio manager can both build and test a strategy by typing a few sentences."
Read more: Calcalist
