Instacart Co-Founder Launches AI Hedge Fund That Lets Agents Call All the Shots
Apoorva Mehta, co-founder of Instacart, has launched Abundance — a Palo Alto-based hedge fund that deploys thousands of AI agents to handle research, stock selection, position sizing, and trade execution with zero human portfolio managers. The firm raised $100M in seed equity and has already outperformed multiple indexes, though Mehta declined to name which ones.
Original sourceApoorva Mehta, the co-founder who turned Instacart into a $10 billion grocery delivery giant, has made a dramatic pivot into quantitative finance with a twist: the fund's investment decisions are made entirely by AI agents.
Abundance, based in Palo Alto, employs thousands of bots that continuously scan the internet for trade ideas, conduct research, select stocks for long and short positions, determine bet sizes, and execute trades. The firm raised $100 million in seed equity financing and currently trades primarily its own capital, with plans to accept outside money in the future. Mehta, 39, started the company with a team of quantitative researchers, engineers, and AI experts who develop and maintain the models — but crucially, the quants don't make investment calls. The agents do.
Mehta says he was inspired to start Abundance after OpenAI released its o3 model in late 2024, which demonstrated substantially stronger reasoning on complex multi-step tasks. "We had a hunch that generative AI could be used to make more and more consequential decisions, even capital allocation decisions," Mehta told Bloomberg. The firm has since built strategies that operate on market data, earnings reports, news, and social sentiment feeds simultaneously.
While Mehta claims Abundance has outperformed "multiple indexes" since launch, he declined to specify which benchmarks or provide audited performance data — a notable gap for a fund positioning itself as a proof-of-concept for AI-driven investing. Traditional quant funds also use algorithmic systems, but Abundance represents a more radical bet: eliminating the human judgment layer entirely rather than using AI to augment it.
The hedge fund space has been watching the AI agent wave with cautious interest. Funds like Two Sigma and Renaissance Technologies have employed ML for years, but Abundance's all-agent model — and its $100M seed at formation — signals that venture capital is willing to fund the thesis that generative AI can replace, not just assist, fundamental portfolio management.
Panel Takes
The Builder
Developer Perspective
“Abundance is the most aggressive real-money test of the agent-as-decision-maker thesis. The $100M seed validates the infrastructure bet, but the lack of audited returns data is a red flag. Watch the 18-month performance report — that's the real signal.”
The Skeptic
Reality Check
“Claiming to outperform 'multiple indexes' without naming them or providing audited data is a classic hedge fund soft-launch move. Algorithmic trading funds have been doing this with ML for decades; Abundance is catching the GenAI wave more than doing anything structurally new.”
The Futurist
Big Picture
“Abundance represents the logical endpoint of the current agent productivity wave applied to capital allocation. If agents can compound research, analysis, and execution faster than human analysts, the performance gap will only widen as models improve. This fund will either be legendary or a cautionary tale — nothing in between.”