Nof1 Raises $15M to Test Frontier AI Models in Live Trading, Most Lose Money

Nof1 raised $15 million in a funding round co-led by SUI Group and Karatage. The investment highlights growing Wall Street interest in experiments testing whether frontier AI models can trade profitably in live markets. SUI Group is a Nasdaq-listed company focused on building institutional exposure for the Sui blockchain ecosystem.

Karatage is a London-based proprietary hedge fund specializing in emerging-technology investments across digital assets, artificial intelligence and gaming. Both firms backed Recursive Superintelligence with TwinPath Ventures before broader market attention arrived. Recursive Superintelligence is a self-improving AI startup reportedly valued above $4 billion.

Nof1’s flagship experiment is called Alpha Arena. It pits frontier AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI against each other in autonomous trading competitions using real capital. Most models in Alpha Arena lost money, overtraded or struggled with risk management.

Both Nof1 and Recursive are grounded in Open-Endedness Research. The shared approach reflects a conviction that the next AI race could play out inside financial markets rather than solely in language-based applications. SUI Group and Karatage’s dual bets suggest a coordinated thesis on AI systems that evolve through real-world outcomes rather than prediction alone.

Following season two, Nof1 plans to launch a consumer platform which will be the world’s first coding agents for markets. The platform will feature the company's frontier models developed using open ended AI architecture which continually improves and aims to eclipse human and algorithmic traders. 8 million across Bitcoin, Ethereum, BSC, and Base.

6 BNB. Thorchain’s RUNE token fell about 12 percent following the exploit news. The Nof1 article was written by Will Canny and edited by Sheldon Reback.

M. Parts of the article were generated with the assistance from AI tools and reviewed by the editorial team. CoinDesk reported all of the above.