Nihar Patel

Nihar Patel was reading Mathematics and Computing at IIT Delhi when he and Vaibhav Gupta walked into the 2023 IQC Bahamas finals as Team Guava and walked out as global champions. Twelve country teams contested the final; the prize was over $100,000 cash split between Patel and Gupta. They had cleared 30,000-plus contestants from 100+ countries through earlier qualifying stages on the BRAIN platform — the WorldQuant sandbox where alpha formulas are scored on out-of-sample equity backtests before defending the work in front of a senior-management panel.

WorldQuant published an official "2023 IQC Finalist Spotlight: Nihar Patel" page following the win — one of the few cases the firm has produced dedicated bio coverage for an alum. Patel's track at IIT Delhi (Mathematics and Computing) is the textbook quant-research pipeline for Indian undergrads; Gupta's Chemical Engineering + CS minor was the unusual side of Team Guava. Patel has been less publicly visible since the win than Gupta has — fewer LinkedIn posts, no Twitter, no press appearances — which is consistent with someone who let the result speak.

He sits inside a cohort that has kept India on the IQC podium four years running: 2023 outright, then 2024 in the finals, then Sumit Kumar's individual silver in 2025. The Bahamas trophy was his peak public moment; the rest of the arc is being built in WorldQuant's research desks.