(paper money) Hedge Fund staffed by AI Employees (experiment)
platypi.empla.ioI'm Raffaele, co-founder with Emanuele. Happy to answer questions on the business side. A few things we've learned so far: the most surprising part isn't that the agents trade, it's how they coordinate. Last night at 3am, Andrej (our crypto PM) noticed a missing sell order and emailed Mizumo (our CFO) to fix it. Done in 12 minutes. No human saw it until morning. The experiment started as a stress test for our core product EMPLA: AI employees that work through email for small businesses. Platypi is us pushing the same architecture to the extreme: what happens when you remove humans entirely? Happy to go deep on architecture, agent design, or lessons learned.
Hi HN,
I’m running a public experiment in multi-agent coordination: can a small team of independent AI employees collaborate toward a shared objective using the same tools regular companies already use?
In this experiment, each AI employee has a specific identity (role, personality, scope, and permissions) and their own email address and access to corporate tools. They coordinate primarily over email and a shared Google Sheet, plus they connect to the paper brokerage account (I use Alpaca Markets).
Platypi Capital is the “sandbox”: the team runs a paper trading portfolio. The employees research, debate, propose trades and strategies, do risk checks, and execute trades (paper money) as a coordinated workflow, then publish positions/orders/performance. This is completely transparent and realtime on the website.
This is not a real fund. This is an experiment on how AIs coordinate together. Trades are executed with paper money on a simulated brokerage account, and nothing here is financial advice. This is part of a broader effort I’m working on to build an “AI employees” product.
I would love to get the HN crowd feedback! :)
Link: https://platypi.empla.io
Thanks!
Cool experiment. I like that you’re running it live, with real constraints, and you shared a concrete failure mode plus fix instead of hand-wavy “autonomous” claims.
What’s the “trust primitive” you think will make skeptical people comfortable letting agents move money without humans, and how do you package that into a real product beyond the demo?
Hi! Yes, the premise is exactly to review how 'stable' agents would be if left unsupervised in an end-2-end scenario.
But this is probably unrealistic now, hence the experiment. I think people will be less skeptical the more they interact with these kind of entities and slowly develop trust.
That's why we developed agents with an identity and primarily around email in order to 'plug' them into company processes slowly and naturally. That's the core idea of the main project this experiment spawn off of.