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<\/p>\nVigil\u2019s founder and CEO, Kole Lee, dropped out of Stanford to start what may become the world\u2019s largest hedge fund, powered by real time data from proprietary sources, and a reasoning system specifically trained to advise and augment human traders. His first customer is himself. Lee is literally betting his fortune on his startup.<\/p>\n
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Calder White, CTO (left), Kole Lee, CEO (center) and Daniel Nunes (right).<\/p>\n
Vigil<\/p>\n
Lee is a former teenage magician who once performed for Silicon Valley luminaries, he traces his interest in computing back to his grandmother, one of UCLA\u2019s first Fortran programmers. In high school, he started building his personal wealth by trading equities, but soon gravitated toward crypto. He interned at Pantera Capital, led Stanford\u2019s Blockchain Club, and turned a small personal crypto stake into a fortune. \u201cI\u2019ve always believed that markets reward intelligence and adaptability,\u201d he said. \u201cAI is the purest way to scale those qualities.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2024, Lee made headlines when he persuaded the student-run Blyth Fund to allocate seven percent of its portfolio to Bitcoin. At the time, Bitcoin was trading at roughly $42,000. The move drew national attention and over a million views across social platforms. \u201cIt was a lesson in conviction and timing,\u201d Lee told me. \u201cMarkets are intelligence games. The edge comes from who can see the signals first and act with confidence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Getty creative loves the idea of a superhero trading equities and crypto.<\/p>\n
getty<\/p>\n
The key to the system is where Vigil gets its data. It supplements traditional sources that everyone uses with a proprietary combination of data gleaned from diverse sources, like social media, Reddit, and predictive markets, the sum of which, Lee admitted, is their own \u201cblack box.\u201d Instead of training an LLM, the company is building infrastructure to harness existing AI advances but with a specialized reasoning system for trading. \u201cThe result\u201d said Lee in an interview yesterday, \u201cis continuous, superhuman coverage of global markets, surfacing opportunities no single analyst could monitor.\u201d<\/p>\n
Comparison with Wall Street\u2019s famous \u201cblack box\u201d systems is inevitable. Firms like Renaissance Technologies and Citadel have long cultivated reputations for secretive algorithmic models that churn through massive datasets to identify patterns and generate trades. Vigil sits in the same competitive frame, but its founder argues the approach is fundamentally different. Their reasoning system is built to focus and advise traders, making them \u201cbionic,\u201d able to spot, and measure opportunity and risk.<\/p>\n
Vigil founder Kole Lee was inducted into the Magic Castle’s exclusive club for professional magicians when he was 13.<\/p>\n
getty<\/p>\n
The company\u2019s longer-term vision is to build a \u201cprediction engine\u201d that learns directly from financial markets, which serves as the reward system. Every tick of data is a feedback loop, teaching the AI how to adapt and improve. If successful, Vigil would blur the line between algorithmic trading and applied machine reasoning.<\/p>\n
\u201cApplying AI to solve the markets is among the largest opportunities in the intelligence era,\u201d said Koko Xs, Cofounder at Nova. “Every generational technology company has a core cash engine that fuels compounding innovations, and a new generation of missionary hedge funds like DeepSeek are emerging as the dominant tech players. We hold deep conviction in Kole\u2019s magical ability to shape markets and the future.\u201d<\/p>\n
The small founding team of four blends computer science and trading backgrounds. Chief Product Officer Daniel Nunes worked at the intersection of crypto and analytics. Newly appointed Chief Technology Officer Calder White has a diverse background in programming, system-level engineering, and real-world trading. By 20, he had helped scale Tensor, the leading NFT exchange on Solana, to process over $3B in annual volume.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt comes down to who adapts fastest,\u201d Lee said. \u201cby changing the timing and quality of information traders get, AI will turn the smartest human traders into super traders \u201d<\/p>\n
Nova led the seed round, with participation from Lux Capital, Pantera Capital, SV Angel, Soma Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Jack Altman, Kevin Hartz, Cyan Banister, Micky Malka, and several prominent AI researchers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Vigil\u2019s founder and CEO, Kole Lee, dropped out of Stanford to start what may become the world\u2019s largest…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":95912,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,56022,28770,61,17531],"class_list":{"0":"post-95911","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-kole-lee","14":"tag-stanford","15":"tag-technology","16":"tag-vigil"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95911"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95911\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/95912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}