Prodigy Claims Its Quantitative Model Doubled Real Returns

YC S26 company Prodigy Research officially launched, claiming that its quantitative financial foundational model achieved over 100% real returns during the YC incubation period, effectively doubling the principal.

The company stated that the strategy employs a Delta-neutral structure and reported no weekly losses throughout the entire period; the benchmark was the S&P 500 and NASDAQ indices, which either fell or remained flat during the same period.

Prodigy claimed that its AI quantitative traders surpassed the 90th percentile traders at Jane Street and outperformed Claude Fable and GPT-5.6 Sol in financial research and quantitative assessments. These comparisons are self-reported by the company, with no public evaluation sets, scoring criteria, or independent verification available.

The company has not disclosed the actual principal, trading targets, leverage, turnover rate, trading costs, capacity limits, maximum drawdown, account statements, or third-party audit reports; therefore, the 100% return cannot be directly translated into replicable, scalable, or risk-adjusted strategy returns.

The founding team consists of brothers Michael Wang and Yuhua Wang. Michael Wang previously worked as a quantitative trader at Jane Street and later participated in cutting-edge model training at Google DeepMind; Yuhua Wang worked on AI systems at Apple and Salesforce.

In terms of market mechanism, Prodigy is currently still a research-oriented AI company supported by YC, rather than a quantitative fund raising externally. Investors are purchasing a growth option that "the model can replace financial research and trading labor"; if the strategy is effective and scalable, funds will flow into model training, data, execution infrastructure, and talent; otherwise, they will be consumed by trading costs, slippage, crowded trades, and risk exposure.

Source: Public Information