Full-Time
Quantitative Researcher
Vigil Labs
1-10 employees
Applied AI research for market trading
Compensation Overview
$200k - $350k/yr
H1B Sponsorship Available
Palo Alto, CA, USA
In Person
 Quantitative Finance (2) |
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- Quant research experience at a top-tier firm (HRT, Jane Street, Citadel Securities, or comparable)
- Strong statistical and programming fundamentals (Python and/or C++)
- A track record of owning research that made it into production
- Deep, personal interest in markets — you trade, you follow them, you think about them
- Design, research, and test systematic trading strategies end to end
- Build and improve the research infrastructure, signals, and models that drive our trading
- Work directly with engineers and AI researchers to ship research into production fast
- Help set the research culture and standards of an early team
- Coming off garden leave / out of a noncompete
- A senior quant who left the industry for a startup (Mercor, etc.) and misses markets
Vigil Labs is a team with backgrounds from xAI and Citadel, IMO medalists, and top ranked crypto and Polymarket traders building AI for markets. Their research lab builds technology at first to supercharge our own traders, and ultimately build a prediction engine that can enable the world to see the future better. This technology is currently deployed internally through an initial 8 figure hedge fund, anchored by the founder of IMC trading. They recently had our 20m seed round led by Ribbit Capital, with other investors include Lux Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Nova, and many angels from the Silicon Valley and finance space (Don Wilson - founder of DRW, CEO of Kalshi, Founders of DoorDash and Ramp)
Company Size
1-10
Company Stage
Seed
Total Funding
$5.7M
Headquarters
Palo Alto, California
Founded
2025
Get referred to Vigil Labs
See people who can refer or advise you
Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- Vigil raised a $20 million seed round led by Ribbit Capital, with participation from Lux, Valor, Nova, and founders of DoorDash, Ramp, and Kalshi.
- The team brings elite backgrounds from xAI and Citadel, alongside IMO medalists and top-ranked prediction market traders building AI for markets.
- Its prediction engine technology is actively deployed through an internal 8-figure hedge fund anchored by the founder of IMC Trading.
What critics are saying
- Vigil remains a tiny team; no public customers or revenue exist by August 2026.
- Crypto trading alpha decays fast; competitors copy data pipelines and reasoning workflows.
- If bitcoin and altcoin volumes slump, Vigil’s first market vanishes.
What makes Vigil Labs unique
- Kole Lee combines crypto profits, Pantera experience, and Stanford Blockchain credibility.
- Vigil trains reasoning systems on social media, Reddit, and predictive markets.
- The product augments traders instead of replacing them, targeting live-market decision speed.
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Company News
Kole Lee dropped out of Stanford and raised $5.7 million to build Vigil Labs, developing real-time reasoning systems designed to empower a new breed of “bionic” traders.
The post Vigil Labs AI Raises $5.7 Million To Build Bionic Traders appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. Vigil’s founder and CEO, Kole Lee, dropped out of Stanford to start what may become the world’s largest hedge fund, powered by real time data from proprietary sources, and a reasoning system specifically trained to advise and augment human traders. His first customer is himself. Lee is literally betting his fortune on his startup. Calder White, CTO (left), Kole Lee, CEO (center) and Daniel Nunes (right) in the Vigil Palo Alto office Vigil Lee is a former teenage magician who once performed for Silicon Valley luminaries, he traces his interest in computing back to his grandmother, one of UCLA’s first Fortran programmers. In high school, he started building his personal wealth by trading equities, but soon gravitated toward crypto. He interned at Pantera Capital, led Stanford’s Blockchain Club, and turned a small personal crypto stake into a fortune. “I’ve always believed that markets reward intelligence and adaptability,” he said. “AI is the purest way to scale those qualities.” In 2024, Lee made headlines when he persuaded the student-run Blyth Fund to allocate seven percent of its portfolio to Bitcoin. At the time, Bitcoin was trading at roughly $42,000. The move drew national attention and over a million views across social platforms. “It was a lesson in conviction and timing,” Lee told me. “Markets are intelligence games. The edge comes from who can see the signals first and act with confidence.” Getty creative loves the idea of a superhero trading equities and crypto. getty The key to the system is where Vigil gets its data. It supplements traditional sources that everyone uses with a proprietary combination of data gleaned from diverse sources, like social media, Reddit, and predictive markets, the sum of which, Lee admitted, is their own “black box.” Instead of training an LLM, the company is building infrastructure to…