Artificial intelligence has become finance’s favorite buzzword. From robo-advisors to quant hedge funds, “AI-driven” products promise to sift oceans of data and uncover investment signals no human could ever spot.
In India, several companies, including Quantum Street AI, Kuvera, Wright Research, and Scripbox, have joined this bandwagon. These fintech and AI-based asset management models show strong promise, particularly for democratizing investing, reducing costs, and scaling to new investor segments. They may very well deliver positive performance for customers.
However, before choosing an AI-based fund or robo-advisory service, proper due diligence is essential. Customers should evaluate the following tailored pointers:
- Longevity: How long has the product/company been operating?
- Actual Returns: What are the verified, non-back-tested returns (3-5 years or as long as available)?
- Tech Foundation: Is the model based on sound and innovative technology?
- Leadership Expertise: Do key technical or AI experts sit on the leadership team?
- Performance Disclosure: What disclosures exist about back-tested versus live performance?
Case Study: Quantum Street AI
Among the earliest and most visible global players in this space is Quantum Street AI. The company sits at an interesting crossroads: part genuine infrastructure provider to large institutions, and part public test-case for whether AI stock-picking can consistently beat the market with its technical expertise.
Quantum Street AI primarily provides AI-driven indexes and decision-support tools to major banks, insurers, and wealth managers. With several billion dollars in client assets invested through its strategies (often cited in the US$5–7 billion range), it acts as a “platform as a service” where institutions can rank securities, construct, or optimize portfolios using its proprietary models.
The company also offers AI-powered indexes licensed to asset managers, most famously the AI-Powered Equity Index, which is tracked by the Amplify AI-Powered Equity ETF (ticker: AIEQ). This means Quantum Street AI is not just a single fund; it is a technology and index provider whose models appear both in public ETFs and in institutional mandates.
AIEQ Performance and Transparency
The AIEQ ETF tracks an index built from Quantum Street’s AI models. The system ingests massive amounts of data, including financial statements, economic indicators, and millions of news items and filings, to score U.S. stocks based on expected return, risk, and correlations. The ETF holds a concentrated portfolio that is frequently rebalanced as the models update.
However, several independent analyses show that AIEQ has underperformed the S&P 500, despite taking on more risk. For many observers, this performance record undermines the narrative that AI stock selection will reliably beat low-cost passive investing.
Like many AI-branded funds, AIEQ discloses a broad methodology but not the full model logic or feature set. Third-party analysts often complain that it is difficult to determine what exactly the AI is doing, how often the models change, or how to attribute performance to specific signals.
The Leadership Challenge
Quantum Street AI’s strength lies in its scale and data infrastructure. Its platform is explicitly built to process massive amounts of unstructured, global, and alternative data on tens of thousands of companies, a feat that human analysts and traditional models struggle to replicate at comparable speed.
However, a concerning observation is the apparent lack of a strong technical presence in the company’s leadership team, a vital element in the AI world. As automation, cybersecurity, and data infrastructure become central to competitive advantage, companies without technical leadership risk falling behind.
The CEO, Subhra Tripathy, comes from an asset management background, having worked in portfolio construction at NatWest Markets, however left NatWest market under questionable circumstances and had a decade-long break in his career before joining Quantum Street AI as CEO. The rest of the leadership team also carries investment management backgrounds. The most resilient AI-driven companies are often those where leadership doesn’t just manage technology, they deeply understand it.
The Takeaway
Other AI-based asset management and robo-advisory companies, such as Scripbox and Kuvera, appear to be faring well in terms of growth and possess a stronger technical presence in their leadership teams.
Zooming out to the entire AI-investing universe, Quantum Street AI looks less like an outlier and more like a microcosm of the field: AI is clearly powerful at digesting information and supporting decisions, but the leap from better data to reliably better risk-adjusted returns is still a work in progress.
As a customer, your due diligence remains paramount. Evaluate their product, their technology, and, crucially, their team.