North Pond Capital Management (“North Pond”) was founded by Ephraim Zimmerman, a student at Brandeis University during his first year. Named after the North Pond Nature Sanctuary in Chicago, North Pond is a data-driven, quantitative investment management firm. The firm's investments are managed through autonomous expert systems that utilize thousands of distinct environmental parameters to inform their decision-making. To enhance their autonomous capabilities, the company employs a range of evolutionary computation tools, giving particular focus to genetic algorithms — instruments that simulate Darwin's theory of evolution.

By deploying hundreds of instances of these algorithms across a suite of securities, including equities, commodity futures, and indexes traded on the United States, European, and Asian markets, the firm is able to scale-up easily whilst concurrently allowing for a broad amount of diversification. The algorithms are fundamentally built upon forms of dynamic machine learning, thus, they improve with changing market conditions and learn from erroneous decisions.