Here's Why Billionaire Steve Cohen Is Investing in Startups

Billionaire hedge fund manager Steve Cohen is entering the venture capital space. Point72 Ventures, the VC arm of Cohen's Point72 Asset Management, is investing in crowd-sourced trading algorithm platform Quantopian. Quantopian enables anyone around the world to create a trading algorithm. 'Quantopian picks the best algorithms and puts capital towards that,' said Matthew Granade, leader of Point72 Ventures. Point72 invested $2 million into Quantopian, which boasts 85,000 members and over 400,000 algorithms, and is allocating $250 million worth of capital into the fund. 'Investing is really a talent business,' Granade said. 'We have a great platform in a lot of big cities around the world. What Quantopian does is swing the door open and let you look all over the world from all sorts of backgrounds and lets people try their hand at creating quantitative algorithms and we think that's an exciting new way to attract talent to the industry.' TheStreet's Scott Gamm reports from Wall Street.