# Zoa Research

> Zoa Research is a New York-based AI research lab building cross-domain quantitative forecasting models that generalize across finance, science, and beyond. Founded by Greg Volynsky and Sam Damashek - a Harvard Law/CMU duo and a Jane Street algorithmic trading veteran - Zoa trains LLM-powered multi-agent systems to automate the model-build-test-improve cycle. The result: forecasting engines that outperform narrow models in event prediction, deployed both as proprietary trading capital and as a Forecast-as-a-Service API for researchers, traders, and scientific labs. Backed by Y Combinator (S24), Zoa is building the infrastructure layer for probabilistic reasoning at scale.

- **Founded:** 2024
- **Headquarters:** New York, NY, USA
- **Founders:** Greg Volynsky (CEO), Sam Damashek (CTO)
- **Team size:** ~5 employees
- **Products:** Proprietary Algorithmic Trading, Forecast-as-a-Service (FaaS), Z-Grants
- **Notable:** Accepted into Y Combinator Summer 2024 cohort (one of ~75% AI startups in the batch), Launched Z-Grants program offering $10K for ML research to build a research community, Conducted recruiting coffee chats at Princeton University

## Products & services

- **Proprietary Algorithmic Trading** — Zoa deploys its own forecasting models to trade markets directly, using AI to identify and act on market opportunities. The firm acts as a principal trading operation leveraging its own technology.
- **Forecast-as-a-Service (FaaS)** — An API and console product that gives external customers - researchers, traders, and scientific labs - access to Zoa's cross-domain event forecasting engines. Enables probabilistic event prediction across finance, supply chain, energy, and natural events.
- **Z-Grants** — A $10,000 grant program for ML research projects. Recipients share learnings and join Zoa's research community, building a distributed network of forecasting researchers.

## Achievements

- Accepted into Y Combinator Summer 2024 cohort (one of ~75% AI startups in the batch)
- Launched Z-Grants program offering $10K for ML research to build a research community
- Conducted recruiting coffee chats at Princeton University
- Built cross-domain forecasting engines using LLM multi-agent optimization loops analogous to AlphaEvolve

## Latest updates

- **2024-06** — Zoa Research joins Y Combinator Summer 2024 batch with cross-domain AI forecasting platform
- **2024** — Launched Z-Grants program offering $10,000 grants for ML research projects
- **2024** — Launched Forecast-as-a-Service API for external researchers and traders

## Links

- Website: https://zoaresearch.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/zoa-research

---

Profile page: https://yespress.io/zoa-research
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-04-27