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Cryptocurrencies have been the fastest growing asset class over the past 15 years, with a total market capitalization of $3.14 trillion today.
But for many, it still feels like the Wild West, and it can be difficult to make sense of what is real investment and what is a pyramid scheme.
Three finance students, Andreas Blom, Jonathan Engberg Conrad and Anthon Aaby Lorentzen, have set out to change that.
After writing a bachelor’s thesis on the same topic, the founders founded the startup Azpire Capital last year, where they believe they can use research and machine learning models to read and invest based on the many signals in the crypto market.
“The crypto market is incredibly interesting because it has historically yielded such high returns. But that’s not why we’ve done this. We exist to help investors de-risk the crypto market,” says Andreas Blom, co-founder and CEO of Azpire Capital. He continues:
“The crypto market is one of the markets that has a high signal value. This means that there are clear patterns in the way digital coins rise and fall and market psychology plays a major role. This means that we can use economic models to identify the signals and thus predict which cryptocurrencies will fall and rise.”
It’s not so much that the entrepreneurs have “figured it out,” but rather that the crypto market is still relatively unexplored as an investment landscape.
“There have been thousands of brilliant researchers studying stock market signals for more than 200 years, but because the crypto market is so young, there are still many aspects of it that have yet to be turned around and decoded. We currently have the advantage of being a first mover and the ambition is that we can get better and better at reading the complex signals.”
Teamed up with university lecturer
The three young founders will complete all their master’s degrees (Cand.Merc.Fin) this summer.
In building their investment model, they have allied themselves with Associate Professor of Economics at Aarhus University, Christian Montes Schütte, who has also joined the board of Azpire Capital.
“Our model is built on machine learning and the latest research and we have so far tested it on historical data from the beginning of 2020 until February 2025. The results show that if you had invested with our model, you would have been left with an annual return of 47.73% and a total growth of 809% over the last 5 years.”
Through social media and other means, the entrepreneurs have shared the results with acquaintances and people in the venture industry. And several times they have received surprising feedback, says Andreas Blom.
“These are huge results, so many people don’t really believe them when they see them. Now the plan is to take the model and live-test it with the same strategy in the real world. If it works here too, we potentially have something quite groundbreaking.”
Expectations of 500 million.
With Azpire Capital, the founders have already received soft funding from Aarhus University and Salling Fondene.
Now the next step is to finalize their model and seek commitments from investors. The ambition is to launch the fund in the fall of 2025.
“We are not there yet. We are currently still a startup and do not yet have the legal framework to manage capital. So the next step is to raise a minimum of five million in pledges to establish the fund.”
But for entrepreneurs, this is just a fraction of what the fund can do.
“Our ambition is that within the next 2 years we will manage 50 million DKK. DKK 50 MILLION. And we expect that figure to eventually reach around DKK 500 million. DKK 500 MILLION. It’s ambitious, but we believe we can deliver. We believe that we have developed something that is not just a little better, but significantly better than our competitors,” says Andreas Blom.
