Poesis AI hedge fund to charge 1% management, 20% performance fees

Poesis will open AI Clarity, an equity hedge fund whose stock picks are made mainly by AI agents, to outside clients early next year. The Menlo Park, California-based firm will charge a 1% management fee and a 20% performance fee.

The fund will hold 80 to 100 US-listed large-cap stocks with a three-year target holding period, according to people familiar with the plans cited by Bloomberg News. AI agents using quantitative models research and select the stocks and decide when to buy and sell, and when they detect a potential market downturn the fund hedges by shorting a stock index. Popa and his team set the risk limits and other parameters, then review and approve the trades.

For allocators, the diligence questions sit with the humans around the models: who writes the risk limits, how often Popa's team overrides an agent's proposed trade, and what the process does when two parts of it disagree. Those people also said the pair plans to add strategies and eventually build a multistrategy fund for institutional investors, which means an early allocation would be a bet on the platform rather than on one fund.

Popa worked at Capital Group for more than 15 years and was a portfolio manager on its Growth Fund of America, while Elkan led machine learning at Goldman Sachs. The two have run their own money in the strategy since August, and Poesis currently has 10 employees including data scientists and engineers. The amount the firm is raising was not disclosed. People familiar with the plans said the pair could manage billions of dollars with fewer than 100 employees, making Poesis cheaper to run than large multistrategy platforms such as Citadel and Millennium Management.