Julian Ashcroft

Julian Ashcroft is the founder and CEO of Bedrockpip Capital, a hedge fund headquartered in San Francisco that trades more than $7.4 billion in annual volume across global equities, futures, and digital assets. Recognized as one of the leading figures at the intersection of artificial intelligence and institutional investing, Julian has spent more than two decades building systems that see risk and opportunity before the rest of the market does.

From Stanford to the trading floor.

Julian earned a B.S. in Mathematical and Computational Science from Stanford University and an M.S. in Computer Science from University of Chicago, where his research focused on machine learning for financial time series. He began his career on the equity derivatives desk of a top Wall Street investment bank in New York.

He later served as Head of Quantitative Strategies at a leading Chicago trading firm, where he built and led a team of more than 40 researchers and engineers.

Technology as the strategy itself.

In 2015, Julian returned to the West Coast to found Bedrockpip on one conviction: the next generation of returns would belong to firms that treat technology as the strategy itself. Under his leadership, Bedrockpip has grown from a small founding team into one of the most technologically advanced funds in the country.

An AI engine built from the first line of code.

His defining achievement is BedRock, Bedrockpip's proprietary AI trading and automation platform, which Julian conceived and personally led from the first line of code to full deployment. BedRock combines deep reinforcement learning, real-time analysis of alternative data, and autonomous execution to adapt to changing market conditions in milliseconds.

Since launching in 2021, it has automated more than 90 percent of the firm's execution and risk workflows, cut trading costs by over 30 percent, and set a new benchmark for AI-driven investing.

Wall Street discipline, Silicon Valley speed.

Julian is known for a leadership style that pairs Wall Street discipline with Silicon Valley speed. He is a sought-after speaker on the future of AI in finance, an advisor to early-stage fintech founders, and a vocal advocate for transparency and rigorous risk controls in automated trading.

Scholarships, sailing and the Bay.

Julian funds scholarships in mathematics and computer science for first-generation college students. He lives in San Francisco, where he spends his weekends sailing the Bay.