Instacart co-founder Apoorva Mehta has launched Abundance, a Palo Alto-based hedge fund where thousands of autonomous AI agents search 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 already runs some stock-picking strategies with zero human involvement, according to Bloomberg.
How Abundance Works
The 10-person team consists of quantitative researchers, engineers, and AI specialists who build and maintain the models. The agents handle the full trading pipeline: sourcing ideas from across the internet, deep research, stock selection (both long and short), position sizing, and trade execution. While some strategies in development still include a degree of human involvement, the firm’s goal is to remove humans from portfolio management entirely, according to The Economic Times.
“People can only track so many opportunities at once, process them only so deeply, make only so many high-quality decisions,” Mehta told Bloomberg. “Even for the exceptional investor, the process is locked inside their mind. AI changes that entirely.”
Mehta said Abundance’s returns have outperformed multiple indexes but declined to specify which benchmarks.
Context: AI in Capital Markets
Quant firms like D.E. Shaw have sought to minimize human bias in trading for decades. What separates Abundance is the ambition to replace the fundamental portfolio manager role entirely, not just augment it with quantitative signals. The firm was inspired by OpenAI’s o3 model release, which demonstrated advanced reasoning through complex tasks. Mehta’s team bet that the same reasoning capability could extend to capital allocation decisions, according to The Economic Times.
Citadel founder Ken Griffin argued late last year that generative AI isn’t meaningfully helping hedge funds beat the market yet, per Bloomberg. Abundance is the direct counter-thesis: that agents can not only assist traders but replace them.
The Capital Allocation Test
Abundance currently trades its own capital and plans to accept outside money eventually. The firm makes long and short equity bets and intends to expand into other asset classes, Investing.com reported.
The significance isn’t that someone built trading bots. It’s that a founder who built a $10 billion company is betting $100 million that agents can replace the highest-paid humans in finance. Mehta co-founded Instacart in 2012, took it public, and as of June 30 still owned more than 8% of the company. A proven operator with a $10 billion company on his record, Mehta is putting $100 million behind the thesis that agents can make better investment decisions than people.
If Abundance performs, every fund with 50 analysts reviewing the same SEC filings will have to answer why.