Jacob Ayres-Thomson

Jacob Ayres-Thomson is the Founder and CEO at 3AI, a pioneering AI firm revolutionising investing with Alpha Intelligence, a next-generation Generative AI that delivers deeper, more explainable insights for equity investors. With a 20-year career spanning global financial markets, Jacob has advised the UK Treasury during the financial crisis, traded equities at Barclays Capital and Goldman Sachs, and led PwC’s stochastic asset and risk modelling.

Jacob began his career at the top end of finance, from trading £0.5bn per day for Barclays in equity arbitrage strategies, to advising the UK Treasury & DMO on the largest deal in European financial history, at the height of the credit crunch. In 2010, he left his city career to study machine learning Jacob has a wide and successful career at the top end of finance, strong foundation in machine learning research, initially pursuing a PhD before choosing to accelerate his work independently. He holds an MSc with Distinction in Computational Statistics & Machine Learning from the UCL AI Centre, and a First Class Honours BSc in Statistics, Computing, Operational Research & Economics from University College London. He is the recipient of numerous academic prizes, including the Egon Pearson Prize from the world's oldest statistical science department.

Building on this academic foundation, he has also been independently commissioned by Moody's Analytics to advise and share algorithmic IP with their stochastic asset modelling provider Barrie & Hibbert, after innovating algorithmic techniques to remove all model error - something not achieved by a department of PhD's. He has directed quantitative teams in Asia & Europe to develop his asset models for companies such as Mirae Asset, South Korea's largest asset manager. He has worked for or advised over 40 investment banks, asset managers, hedge funds and insurers. He specialises in the development of novel algorithms and techniques for investing and trading and believes he has started a couple of entirely new statistical learning fields fit for the 'trading paradigm' - which center around "learning about learning" - one of which is "stochastic Tsun Zu". He believes good data science is the essence of good investment & trading.

Prior to founding 3AI, Jacob was a founder of stealth research operation Alchematics, which specialises in the development of new techniques in algorithmic trading & investing utilising machine learning, as well as a boutique brokerage. He was also Head of Data Sciences for insurer JRP Group, where he focused on the asset side of the insurer, identifying and innovating novel algorithms and technologies which have influenced £bns of trades within a short tenure. One such learning algorithm solved a problem of greater complexity than that solved by AlphaGo at Google Deepmind and is estimated to be worth £50m to the company. This work earned him national recognition as the UK's top Data Leader in Finance for developing AI that solved near-infinite complexity investing problems.

Today, Jacob leads 3AI, a firm that has built a new category of award-winning investment AI, with systems that predict stock returns 22x more accurately than the combined research efforts of 18,000 traditional research analysts. Since its launch in 2020, the firm has grown rapidly, with its innovations now licensed by tier-1 hedge funds and pursued for integration by investment banks and global financial institutions, influencing approximately $1 trillion in assets. Much like Airbnb owns no hotels and Uber owns no cars, 3AI doesn’t own any assets - yet, its Alpha Intelligence is transforming the way capital is managed. 3AI has been recognised with multiple industry accolades, including “Trading System of the Year” and “Equity System of the Year” at the 2025 Futures & Options World Awards. The company was also ranked #26 on 2025 Sifted100 UK & Ireland Leaderboard of fastest-growing startups and named to the prestigious 2025 WealthTech100 list.