European hedge fund managers Alan Howard and Jens-Peter Stein have put their money behind a startup firm promising to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyse macroeconomic events.

Quant Insight, founded in 2014 by a pair of former hedge fund portfolio managers, Mahmood Noorani and Krishnan Sadasivam, working with astrophysics professors at Cambridge, uses algorithms to crunch vast amounts of data.