KelAI Raises $5M to Build Autonomous AI Platform for Hedge Funds

KelAI, a New York-based startup founded by Jeremie Cohen and part of Y Combinator’s Spring 2026 cohort, has raised $5 million in seed funding. Investors in the round include Paris-based venture firm Frst, Y Combinator, Robinhood Ventures and a group of angel investors with backgrounds in AI and financial markets.

The company said it will use the capital to expand its engineering team selectively and advance product development over the coming months.

KelAI is building an autonomous research platform for hedge funds and other institutional investors. The platform is designed to integrate idea generation, backtesting, signal validation and ongoing monitoring in a single system.

It can connect to a firm’s proprietary datasets, portfolio constraints, risk parameters and historical research. KelAI’s architecture uses autonomous AI agents to run research tasks with limited human oversight.

The startup aims to shorten the time between identifying an investment hypothesis and deploying it as a live trading signal. Automating labor-intensive research functions is intended to allow funds to generate and test a larger number of strategies without a proportional increase in research headcount.

Jeremie Cohen described the potential in a statement: “Artificial intelligence has the potential to fundamentally reshape investment management.” He added: “AI can deliver productivity improvements and generate investment ideas at a speed and scale beyond traditional research teams.”

Adoption by institutional investors will depend on transparency, auditability and robust risk controls. Firms require research processes to be traceable and repeatable when AI-generated signals affect portfolio decisions.

KelAI’s materials highlight integrations with existing risk and constraint frameworks as a feature intended to meet those requirements. The funding comes amid growing investor interest in applying generative AI and autonomous agents to institutional investing.