A 19-year-old entrepreneur is betting that artificial intelligence can bring hedge fund-style investing tools to ordinary traders. Horizon Trade is launching an AI-native platform designed to allow users to describe an investment idea in plain language, test it against historical market data, and automatically deploy it across trading platforms.
The company, founded by Tuvia Ohana, has raised a $2 million pre-Seed round from Entrée Capital and says more than 23,000 traders and investors have joined its waitlist ahead of the platform’s launch.
Ohana founded Horizon after completing high school at 16 and building his first business at a young age. Before starting Horizon, he bootstrapped another company.
The startup’s 15-person team has an average age of around 20 and includes members with entrepreneurial and cybersecurity backgrounds.
For decades, systematic investing, using data, algorithms and automated strategies to make investment decisions, has largely been limited to hedge funds and professional investors with access to expensive data, quantitative researchers and specialized engineers.
Horizon is attempting to change that by using AI agents to remove much of the technical complexity involved in developing and testing investment strategies.
“Most traders are considering multiple ideas or hypotheses at once,” said Ohana, Horizon’s co-founder and CEO. “They assume they’d need to be a developer to test something like that, and that perception alone keeps most ideas from ever being acted on.”
Horizon’s platform allows users to describe a potential trading strategy, ranging from simple rules to more complex approaches involving multiple signals, sectors or asset classes.
The system generates the underlying code, tests the strategy against years of historical market data and analyzes factors including performance and risk before allowing users to deploy it.
The company says a key part of its approach is using the same strategy code for both backtesting and live execution, reducing the risk that a strategy behaves differently when moved from simulation to real trading.
Users can connect Horizon to a range of brokers and exchanges, including Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, Alpaca, E*Trade and TradeStation, and execute strategies automatically.
The company also aims to create a marketplace where traders can share portfolios and strategies with other users.
Horizon is entering a market where investors are already experimenting with AI tools, but where many existing solutions have limitations.
The company argues that general-purpose AI chatbots can answer market questions and help analyze information, but cannot reliably test investment ideas against historical data or manage complex strategies.
At the same time, trading platforms’ own AI tools are generally focused on execution rather than helping users design, validate and refine strategies.
Horizon is positioning itself between those two approaches: combining market research, strategy development, backtesting and execution in one system.
“Building a chatbot with some market data is one thing,” Ohana said. “Building the infrastructure investors can trust with real capital is something else entirely.”
The company’s investors believe AI could significantly reshape how individuals participate in markets.
“Horizon has abstracted the complexity of systematic trading so a first-time investor and a professional portfolio manager can both build and test a strategy by typing a few sentences,” said Avi Eyal, co-founder and managing partner at Entrée Capital.