Gerard Nealon went to early SOLVE pitch meetings with Eugene Grinberg, a developer and a salesperson. When prospective clients asked how many people worked at the company, the answer was four. Every employee was sitting in the room. The office, presumably, was enjoying a rare spell of peace.
It is an unusually good introduction to a business built around listening. Taking the entire staff to a sales meeting gave everyone the opportunity to hear a potential customer’s problem firsthand. It also made the arithmetic awkward. A startup can have an impressive delegation or an occupied office; at that size, choosing both requires a fifth person.
Nealon’s work has involved rather more complicated calculations. He is SOLVE’s co-founder and chief executive officer, alongside fellow co-founder and CEO Grinberg. His professional background runs through computer science, cryptography, systems architecture and the modeling of securities that resist an easy answer. His company grew out of a problem that was both technical and stubbornly human: people were sending valuable market information to one another in forms that computers could not readily use.
The early pitch-meeting story, recalled by Grinberg, captures the company before institutional backing and acquisitions. Nealon was there, in the room, helping discover what the market would actually pay to have fixed. That distinction would matter. The product the founders first tried to sell was not the one that became their business.
The whole company had a seat at the table.
The model met the inbox
At Red Pine Advisors, Nealon and Grinberg worked on analytics for difficult-to-value fixed-income securities. They tried commercializing a pricing model and met prospective customers across the buying and selling sides of the market. The effort did not produce the sales they wanted. It did, however, introduce them to the people whose working days would shape SOLVE.
Those conversations kept returning to price discovery. Customers were receiving large volumes of emails, chats and spreadsheet attachments containing offers and other pricing information. The material was useful, but collecting it systematically was another matter. A model might produce an estimate; the messages contained evidence of what participants were saying in the market.
In a 2022 conversation with Aditi Roy, Grinberg described how he and Nealon learned that the different customer groups shared a need for pricing transparency. Understanding that need gave their technical work a commercial purpose. The job they heard described came before the machinery they would assemble to do it.
Their opportunity was to read the messages, extract their pricing content and make it available for analysis. That required natural language processing and machine learning, together with an understanding of the securities being discussed. The founders established SOLVE in 2011. They had moved from trying to sell their answer to examining how customers gathered the evidence for their own.
“At the end of the day everything came down to price transparency.”Eugene Grinberg · Co-founder of SOLVE · 2022
An architect before a chief executive
Nealon’s preparation included a bachelor’s degree in computer science and graduate study in cryptography at Rochester Institute of Technology. The combination places both implementation and mathematical reasoning in his professional background. SOLVE’s biography credits him with more than twenty years in systems development, securitized-product modeling and analytical tools for esoteric securities.
His earlier positions included ACA Capital, Sandell Asset Management and Houlihan Lokey’s Red Pine Advisors. At ACA, he worked as a lead software architect on a platform supporting the management of more than $90 billion in risk positions. That figure describes the positions supported by the system, rather than money belonging to Nealon. The distinction is worth keeping firmly attached to the number.
At Sandell, his projects included real-time profit-and-loss applications, genetic algorithms and a distributed web crawler. At Red Pine, he built analytical tools for complex, illiquid securities and designed a distributed computation grid. Across those assignments, the recurring practical task was getting difficult calculations and scattered information into systems people could use.
There is a particular kind of continuity here. A web crawler collects information across locations; a computation grid spreads processing across machines; a pricing platform makes observations available across a trading workflow. These are different applications. As a way of reading his career, they show repeated engagement with collection, computation and access. The executive title arrived after substantial experience with the plumbing.
A signature, a stopwatch and an inconvenient result
An earlier piece of Nealon’s work survives in a rather different setting: a 2005 master’s project on ElGamal-type digital signatures, modular arithmetic and Galois fields. Digital signatures help establish who is responsible for a file and whether it has been altered. The research compared ways of implementing the mathematics behind them.
The project’s abstract reports that operations using modular arithmetic were fastest, with a polynomial-basis approach close behind. A normal-basis implementation performed poorly. Nealon also noted that efficient large-integer libraries were difficult to outperform using custom bit-manipulation structures. The results ran against expectations he described in the literature, particularly around hardware implementations.
It is a useful small episode in a technical career because it contains a test and an answer that refused to flatter the expectation. An elegant approach still has to run. Read alongside his later work, the project offers an early example of implementation being measured rather than accepted on reputation. A stopwatch can be an impolite reviewer.
The capital came after the parser
SOLVE’s first years preceded the larger institutional investments that later accompanied its expansion. Credit Suisse Asset Management’s NEXT Investors announced an investment in August 2019, directed toward growth, sales and marketing, and product development. The chronology matters: the company had been operating since 2011 before that round arrived.
In February 2022, SOLVE announced more than $80 million of investment from Charlesbank’s Technology Opportunities Fund. The stated uses included product innovation, acquisitions and geographic expansion. NEXT Investors remained an investor. For the business Nealon co-founded, the additional capital widened the range of things it could attempt beyond growing the original quote platform.
That year brought Advantage Data and Best Credit Data into the company. Then, in September, SOLVE acquired Lumesis, whose DIVER products served the municipal bond market. The transaction brought municipal pricing, analytics and regulatory workflows into the organization, along with Lumesis co-founders Gregg Bienstock and Tim Stevens and their employees.
The change was organizational as well as commercial. A company that began by extracting information from messages was adding specialist products and the people who understood their users. Municipal new-issue pricing and structured-product analytics carry different demands. Acquisitions placed more of those demands inside the same business, expanding the scope of the institution Nealon helped establish.
Returning to the difficult securities
In October 2025, SOLVE acquired MBS Source, a provider of data and trading tools for mortgage- and asset-backed securities. Its capabilities included agency predictive pricing, prepayment modeling and new-issue tools. The acquisition extended SOLVE’s structured-products coverage, a field with clear connections to Nealon’s earlier analytical work.
For someone whose career included mortgage-security modeling and distributed valuation systems, the subject matter forms a recognizable thread. The business had expanded across asset classes, but it was still working on the practical difficulties of understanding securities whose pricing evidence can be dispersed. Greater product breadth had not made the original information problem disappear.
By February 2026, SOLVE was also adding a Confidence Score to its corporate-bond predictive prices. The score uses a scale from one to ten to express model uncertainty. Higher scores represent greater confidence; the interface groups them into low, medium and high categories. The feature covered more than 250,000 investment-grade and high-yield corporate bonds at announcement.
The useful detail is the uncertainty. A predicted price can look deceptively complete when displayed as a single number. Attaching a confidence measure gives a user another question to ask before acting. In the wider story of Nealon’s company, this is another step from collecting observations toward helping professionals judge how to use them.
SOLVE’s Confidence Score groups model confidence on a 1-10 scale. It is not a credit rating.
The office is no longer empty
SOLVE’s September 2026 updates linked trade data, bidding workflows and relative-value analysis more closely. Its enhanced BWIC Monitor let desk members mark securities as Pass, Bid, Won or Lost and see changes to live lists. BWIC is shorthand for bids wanted in competition. Behind the acronym lies an ordinary coordination problem: knowing who is doing what before a deadline.
On October 20, the company announced a preview of New Issue Monitor at ABS East in Miami. Built into SOLVE Quotes, it follows structured-credit deals and their tranches toward pricing while keeping secondary-market information nearby. The release described sixty days of deal history and a view of pricing stages, book status and related details.
The progression is concrete. The early founders heard that market participants could not keep up with their messages. The current product work brings more of the resulting information into the same working environment. It connects the arrival of a deal with the evidence available as securities move through the market. The familiar inbox problem has acquired more neighbors.
Nealon’s career gives this expansion a human scale. Before the CEO title were software architecture, analytical tools and experiments with mathematical implementations. Before the larger organization were four colleagues at a pitch meeting, each hearing the same customer. A business concerned with market transparency began with the founders exposing themselves to a potentially uncomfortable answer.
There is a pleasing economy to that origin. They went out carrying a pricing model and returned with a clearer view of the work that needed doing. Years of product development followed, then investors, acquisitions and new tools. The decisive early act was small enough to fit around a meeting table: listen carefully when the customer describes the problem.
Keep following the work
The video features co-founder Eugene Grinberg discussing SOLVE’s origins and acquisitions.