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Kimpton

Live Evaluation Arenas for Financial Work

In investment management, every decision gets graded. The market prints the answer on a date known in advance, and nobody gets to argue with it. Kimpton is financial AI that answers to reality. Kimpton OS is the AI-native operating system for investment teams: it does the research and hands PMs structured trades. EarningsBench is a public benchmark where models forecast quarterly earnings before companies report and the reported numbers do the scoring. Koliseum is the set of point-in-time financial environments we build from that work, for labs to train and evaluate models on. The whole industry is fighting underperformance. Active managers trail their benchmarks, and capital keeps bleeding into passive. AI was supposed to fix that, but it hasn't. Funds either stitch together a dozen point tools or babysit general agents all day, and neither gets them to the trade. Kimpton OS goes straight to it. It ingests a fund's mandate, strategy, and positions, connects to the institutional data the fund already runs on, and returns a structured trade proposal built for that fund. It's built to disagree, because consensus is poison for investment decisions. Instead of telling a PM what they want to hear, it surfaces the breaches and risks they'd otherwise miss. That same work is how we grade AI. Static benchmarks leak into training data. Simulations reward what their authors imagined. A forecast sealed before the outcome exists and scored when the company reports can't be rehearsed or backdated. We started in markets because they're the one place reality answers on schedule. We're two ex-Goldman engineers and an ex-SpaceX engineer. We left to start our own quantitative systematic hedge fund, raised $10M from a family office at 21 and 22, and scaled it to $35M over four years. We learned to trust live results over historical fit. We built Kimpton inside that fund, then productized the stack. We're live with our first institutional client, a $3.3B manager. Our first market is fundamental equity funds from $1B to $10B, and the labs that need to know whether their models can do this work.
Active Founders
Jack Zumwalt
Jack Zumwalt
Founder/CEO
Co-founder, CEO @ Kimpton AI (YC P26). Building live evaluation arenas for financial work. Jack ran systematic strategies and managed daily operations of Level III Capital, a quantitative systematic trading firm he co-founded after raising $10M to seed the fund at the age of 22. Prior to that, he was a detection engineer at Goldman Sachs, writing algorithms to detect malicious threat actors who were trying to cyber attack the investment bank.
Adrian Del Bosque
Adrian Del Bosque
Founder/Founding Engineer
Co-founder, Founding Engineer @ Kimpton AI (YC P26). Building live evaluation arenas for financial work. Adrian was a founding engineer at Level III Capital, a quantitative systematic trading firm, where he built the trading infrastructure. Prior to that, he was a Senior Cloud & Platform Engineer at Vistra, managing the cloud infrastructure behind the monitoring application for its 44,000 megawatt power generation fleet. He began his career at SpaceX as part of the Automation & Controls team.
Mauricio Ortiz
Mauricio Ortiz
Founder/CTO
Co-founder, CEO @ Kimpton AI (YC P26). Building live evaluation readings for financial work. Mauricio oversaw the entire technical implementation of the investment process, from research to trade execution, at Level III Capital, a quantitative systematic trading firm he co-founded after raising $10M to seed the fund at the age of 21. Prior to that, he was part of the critical infrastructure team at Goldman Sachs which handled systems for its consumer bank and the Apple Card.
Company Launches
Koliseum by Kimpton, Live Evaluation Arenas for AI Models
See original launch post

Today we're launching Koliseum by Kimpton, live evaluation arenas for AI models in financial work.

The problem

Static benchmarks are contaminated soon after publication, and simulations reward the assumptions their designers encode.

This simply isn't acceptable in finance or any other professional industry. A wrong answer or action can be catastrophic and reality eventually shows whether the claim was right. Almost no evaluation waits to find out.

Koliseum

Before Kimpton, we ran a quantitative fund. Backtests never proved alpha; live markets did. Koliseum applies the same test to models: a model commits inside an arena, the record is sealed, and reality supplies the grade.

Two kinds of arenas:

  • Prediction Arenas seal a forecast before the outcome exists and score it against consensus, market, and statistical baselines when reality resolves.
  • Action Arenas give a model a bounded task and real tools, then verify success from the resulting system state.

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The first Prediction Arena is already running. EarningsBench seals earnings forecasts for public companies 24 hours before each release and scores them against consensus and a statistical baseline once results are public.

Two things are already clear: most open-weight models reproduce consensus exactly, and a simple statistical baseline is harder to beat than a leaderboard alone would suggest.

Along with these developments, we are introducing a new concept in evaluation: reality-as-a-judge.

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Most open-ended evaluations are graded by another model or by a human rubric, so the score inherits the grader's assumptions. In reality-as-a-judge, the grader is the outcome itself.

More info on Koliseum

Methodology

Our ask

Reach out if:

  • You work on post-training or evals at a lab and want your model in the first private cohort. Results stay private unless you publish them.
  • You run a trading firm or a prediction venue and want models scored on your own resolving questions, or want to co-run a public arena.
  • You have a workflow (any industry!) with a verifiable end state and want it turned into an Action Arena.

or know anyone who does.

Write to us at founders@kimpton.ai. Thanks for the support!

Previous Launches
AI-native terminal where agents do the research and propose the trades
YC Photos
Kimpton
Founded:2025
Batch:Spring 2026
Team Size:5
Status:
Active
Location:New York City, NY
Primary Partner:Aaron Epstein