What are you trading equities, futures, options, FX, etc?
I was looking for algo prop firms a while ago, but didn't find anything that seemed to make sense for me. I have a bit more capital (low 6 fig), so my motivation was to get lower commissions and possibly cheaper data access through the firm rather than having to pay a 3rd party data vendor (which would have cost me $800-3000/mo + exchange fees).
Most prop firms I see mentioned don't really offer a lot of capital (at least at first) and are quite protective of their capital (understandable). Because you would likely not get much capital and possibly have to modify your algo to comply with the firms risk and other restrictions, by the time you get to the point that they give you decent capital, you may have just been able to save up yourself.
If you do happen to find a reputable algo prop firm, please post here as I'm interested as well. Good luck.
I am trading equities strictly. Initially had a HFT ES model but put it on the shelf for now, just due to the fact that I don't think I could actually compete with the other algos due to lack of execution speed.
Capital for my equity model is not a real issue. The amount of allocated capital would only limit the amount of symbols I could trade within a day. In developing the model, I didn't take a position of over 500 shares and only traded stocks between 10-40 dollars. As a matter of fact the initial capital I started at was 100,000. But I do see your point of firms trying to protect their capital especially with someone who is unproven like myself.
I will keep searching and when/if I find some useful information I will pass it your way for sure.