Exclusive Q&A: Axyon AI co-founder and CEO, Daniele Grassi, speaks to London Daily News on recent funding and growth plans
Tell us about Axyon AI
“Axyon AI is a high-tech, AI-powered factory of alpha that helps asset managers improve their performance. We deliver market forecasts and model strategies, which are generated using a highly advanced, proprietary auto-ML technology.
Since the company was founded in 2016, it has received over $3M in funding from ING and UniCredit (among others), and has a tech-heavy team based in the north of Italy with clients worldwide.”
How is Axyon AI’s platform Axyon IRIS® helping asset managers in today’s volatile market?
“Axyon IRIS® is an auto-ML platform that trains, selects and evolves AI-powered predictive models. Daily predictions then inform asset rankings and model strategies, which are delivered to clients.
By integrating our insights into clients’ investment process (both discretional and systematic), clients are able to add an original alternative source of alpha to their strategies, thus increasing performance while having a positive impact on robustness.”
Do you think AI has the potential to predict future times of market volatility or crashes?
“AI is well suited to detect patterns in the financial market activity that may represent anomalous trends. AI can be very useful to highlight when behavioural patterns between assets and overall financial context break down, alerting managers and investment practitioners that market dynamics may soon experience a move.”
How does the platform incorporate ESG credentials, and is there growing importance on these standards?
“We integrate ESG data as a source of information for our AI engine. In general, I believe that its importance for predictive purposes will increase along with the quality of the data itself. It is currently tough to access historical point-in-time data in the ESG space. Hence, its integration into machine learning models requires extra care to avoid overfitting and information leaks that would, in turn, be detrimental to the AI predictive performance.”
What are Axyon AI’s growth plans in the UK and beyond?
“Notwithstanding Brexit – which adds complexity to our market – the UK is a crucial market for our company. We plan to increase our commercial presence in London further in the coming year and be an active participant in several industry events shortly.
At a global level, the US is then our next objective.”
