About

Jackson and I met building Fabublox, a nanotechnology data, design, and collaboration platform, out of Pillar VC's office in Boston. Our work there was the software stack for nanofabrication and, increasingly, the AI we were weaving into it. What stuck with us was how much a hard technical domain opens up once software gives people a shared way to process it, understand it, and build on each other's work.

Markets were the obvious place to try that next: the information is at least as complex as nanofabrication, and most people with money at stake still read it through headlines. We wanted an intuitive way for market information to be processed, understood, and shared between people and AI. That idea became MarketFabric, our research and trading engine.

CommonQuant itself began as a benchmark for my agent swarms. I work on multi-agent AI systems, and markets are the most honest test environment I know of: the verdicts arrive daily, and no amount of eloquence moves them. The question I wanted answered was whether a virtual quant firm — research, strategy, and risk run by agents, with a suite of tools that evolves as the agents learn what they need — could find and adopt strategies no human desk has run.

Keeping the agents honest took machinery: theses registered before testing, evidence with provenance, verdicts that trace back to their causes, a ledger nobody can edit. Building it, we kept noticing that a person trying to think clearly about markets needs the same machinery just as badly as the agents do. So the benchmark became a product. We're early, some of this will change!

Who's building this

Alif Jakir (CTO) builds the agents and the engine. The rest of his work is at alifjakir.com. Jackson Myers (CEO) runs the company.