42 is an AI research company building an autonomous AI Scientist, a system that poses open-ended questions and discovers answers on its own. Its first application is financial markets, where it operates as a trading system without human intervention, deploying real capital in the real world.

Financial markets serve as the initial domain for two reasons. They provide an adversarial non-stationary environment with instant feedback and measurable outcomes, making them a natural stress test and a live validation layer. They also fund expansion into other domains. Markets are not the end goal, but the first proving ground.

42 builds its systems end-to-end, from hypothesis generation and experiment design to execution, evaluation, and real-time adaptation. It operates independently, forming a closed loop between research and action. In financial markets, this spans the full cycle from data analysis and strategy to trading and capital allocation.

The company brings together researchers and engineers across Europe and Canada. Its Chief Science Officer heads the Autonomous AI Lab at Mila, the Quebec AI Institute, and holds a Canada Excellence Research Chair. The lab shares premises with the institute and draws directly from its talent pool.

Financial markets are the beginning. The system is built to extend into other domains. The long-term goal is autonomous agents that expand the frontier of questions that can be asked and answered.