Singapore-headquartered LinqAlpha has launched a dedicated research organisation aimed at answering one of institutional finance’s thorniest AI questions: when can investors actually trust a model’s judgement.

LinqAlpha AI Lab debuts with more than a dozen peer-reviewed publications and a public leaderboard benchmarking investment biases across leading AI models, positioning it as an open reference point for banks, hedge funds and asset managers embedding large language models into research and trading workflows.

A regulatory testing ground in APAC

The launch follows LinqAlpha’s US$22 million Series A funding round and coincides with new subsidiaries in Singapore and Hong Kong. The company said the region’s fragmented regulatory and language environment makes it a demanding proving ground for AI transparency standards that financial institutions elsewhere will eventually need to meet.

“Everyone is deploying AI in the front office, but trust has become the industry’s biggest unanswered question,” said Jacob Chanyeol Choi, Co-founder and Co-CEO of LinqAlpha. “For AI to create long-term value in financial markets, institutions need confidence not only in AI’s outputs, but more importantly, in how its reasoning can be measured, validated and governed.”

Bias research underpins the leaderboard

The Lab’s peer-reviewed study, presented at the ACM International Conference on AI in Finance, found that every foundation model tested carries measurable, persistent investment biases. Separately, researchers reported that filtering trading signals through an LLM that vets their underlying economic logic cut average backtested losses by 46 per cent.

• More than a dozen publications at venues including ICML, ACL and ACM ICAIF
• A public leaderboard benchmarking investment bias across leading AI models
• New research to be published weekly via the Lab’s dedicated Research Hub

The Lab is led by Professor Yongjae Lee, an Associate Professor at UNIST who also sits on Korea’s Presidential National AI Strategy Committee, with Professor Alejandro Lopez-Lira of the University of Florida joining as Academic Advisor.

LinqAlpha serves more than 70 financial institutions across the US, Europe and Asia, with buy-side clients collectively managing over US$5 trillion in assets.