Robert Mercer

Robert Leroy Mercer (born 11 July 1946 in San José, California) is an American computer scientist and investor. He worked for two decades at IBM Research, where he contributed to early statistical approaches to machine translation and speech recognition, work later recognised with the Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014.

In 1993 he joined the quantitative hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, becoming co-chief executive alongside Peter Brown in 2009. He stepped down from that role in 2017 while retaining an interest in the firm.

Mercer is a documented donor to United States political campaigns and to conservative research and advocacy organisations, and was an investor in the data analytics company Cambridge Analytica.