Jannick Malling's first interface was made in Flash, which is a splendidly dated beginning for someone now occupied with the future of finance. He was 13, living outside Copenhagen, and spending enough time online to discover that the internet could be built as well as browsed. He made sites for gaming meetups, small businesses, and his father's company. The animations vanished with the software that produced them. The pleasure of arranging complexity on a screen did not.
At 17, he took that instinct into Saxo Bank. The year was 2005, long before every financial company added “fintech” to its vocabulary and a gradient to its logo. Saxo was an online trading pioneer in Europe, growing quickly and exporting financial software across borders. Malling entered young enough that finance became less a sector he chose than the climate in which he learned to work.
He also arrived at an instructive moment. Within a few years came Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and the financial crisis. The lesson was not merely that markets can behave badly. It was that products, companies, and assumptions can all be stress-tested at once, usually before lunch. Malling says those early shocks trained his ability to compartmentalize. One cannot redesign a button while staring theatrically into the abyss.
A designer raised by markets
After Saxo, Malling joined the founding team of CFH Group in 2008 and led product and innovation work. The original plan ran into the financial crisis and had to change. He then co-founded Tradable, conceived as an operating system for trading. Its premise was strikingly contemporary: let outside developers build applications on common financial infrastructure, then let traders assemble a platform around their own needs.
Tradable earned industry awards and eventually became part of a larger deal. More revealing than the trophies is how Malling talked about its office in 2013. There were beanbags and table football, he said, yet the staff knew how to tie a double Windsor. It was a neat joke about the company he wanted to build: fluent in web culture, credible in the rooms where money moved.
That combination remains his professional signature. Malling calls himself a designer at heart, raised in finance. He thinks about user journeys and income statements in the same breath. A few pixels can change comprehension; comprehension changes behavior; behavior eventually appears in the accounts. The chain is long, but to him it is visible.
“You are the product of all your previous experiences.”Jannick Malling, on learning to trust product intuition
His version of intuition is neither mysticism nor executive swagger. Early on, he assumed he was wrong and tried to disprove his own frameworks. Experience supplied a slightly inconvenient discovery: several of the simple ones held up. Data still mattered. So did judgment trained by a million prior decisions, including the mistaken ones. The spreadsheet and the instinct could share a desk, provided neither behaved like the chairman.
The price of entry, and the feeling of entry
Malling moved to New York soon after the 2016 Brexit vote. He had stepped away after his previous company and returned to hands-on mobile design. Managing his own investments supplied a familiar irritation: established brokerages were powerful, yet their structures often made routine acts such as rebalancing or buying in regular dollar amounts feel needlessly awkward.
Through a shared mentor he met Leif Abraham, a German designer and founder who had also recently exited a company. They saw two related barriers around American investing. The first was financial. If a share cost thousands of dollars, a person with $100 could not buy it or assemble a balanced portfolio. Fractional ownership could lower that threshold. The second barrier was cultural. Generations of trading floors, jargon, and chest-thumping cinema had told many people that the market belonged to someone else.
Public emerged from the distinction. It launched in late 2019 with real-time fractional investing and a community layer designed to make participation feel less solitary. Users could follow other investors, explain an idea, and see the thinking behind a position. Since brokerage customers must verify their identities, the social network had an unusual property: everybody in the room was accountable for being there.
The early Public design brief
The timing was almost indecently eventful. The pandemic sent people home and interest in markets rose. Then the GameStop frenzy of January 2021 produced a surge that tested every consumer brokerage. Public's team had to scale systems while the subject of market access became a national argument. Eighteen months after launch, the company said it had reached one million members. It raised $220 million at a $1.2 billion valuation in 2021.
Malling's preferred metaphor from that period is sailing. A company should recognize when the wind is external, enlarge the sail while it can, and keep building for the day it changes. Wind is useful. Mistaking it for personal genius is how founders end up giving motivational speeches to an empty marina.
Two people in the corner office
Public's leadership structure is uncommon in American technology: Malling and Abraham are both chief executive. The arrangement works because they do not spend every morning jointly approving the coffee. Malling concentrates on product, design, and engineering. Abraham concentrates on growth. They overlap where product and distribution become the same problem, and on the narrow group of decisions consequential enough to demand both perspectives.
Malling has acknowledged the obvious cost. Two people can slow a decision. In a regulated business, however, friction can be useful. Brokerage combines software's appetite for speed with finance's obligation to check the consequences. The shared role also allows each founder to stay close to the craft, customers, and employees instead of ascending into a calendar composed entirely of calendars.
“We needed to not just make the market more accessible, but also more approachable.”Jannick Malling, on Public's original problem
When the social feed met the machine
Public did not remain the 2019 product preserved in amber. It expanded from equities into Treasuries, corporate bonds, options, crypto, retirement accounts, and cash products. In 2023 it introduced AI-assisted research. In 2025 came Generated Assets, which lets an investor describe an idea and use AI to screen stocks into a customizable index. The company raised another $135 million in equity and debt in late 2024 to support its multi-asset and AI direction.
The social layer that once defined Public became less central. Malling and Abraham have said that AI absorbed many of its useful jobs, such as summarizing an earnings call or assembling context around a company. This was a conspicuously unsentimental decision. Founders are expected to adore their original features forever, like parents storing every macaroni portrait. Product builders have the less decorative duty of admitting when a new tool does the work better.
In 2026, Public took the next step with AI agents inside customer accounts. A user can describe a rule or recurring task in plain language, inspect the proposed workflow, and approve it. An agent can then monitor market conditions, research assets, move cash, or execute trades under those defined instructions. Public says the execution plan is deterministic once approved, and users can edit or pause it. The distinction matters in finance, where a creative surprise is delightful in a sonnet and considerably less so in an options order.
For Malling, integration is the advantage. The agent sits inside the authenticated brokerage, connected to portfolio context, market data, and execution. It does not need a stray API key or an improvised bridge from a chatbot. The ambition remains expansive, while the product language emphasizes control: the investor defines the intent, reviews the plan, and carries the decision.
The screen is only the visible part
There is a clean line through Malling's career, although it only looks clean in retrospect. As a teenager, he learned that a screen could organize a complicated activity. At Saxo and CFH, he learned the machinery behind the screen and watched it strain during a crisis. Tradable opened that machinery to developers. Public first rearranged it around smaller dollar amounts and social context, then around multiple assets and artificial intelligence.
The aspiration has grown from access to agency. Owning a fraction of an expensive stock answers who can enter. Research tools answer what they can understand. Automation answers what they can ask the system to do. Each answer also creates fresh responsibilities. A friendly interface does not abolish volatility. An agent does not turn a user's strategy into advice. The work is to make power legible while leaving its risk in view.
Malling still stays close to design decisions, partly because he believes the end-to-end view is valuable and partly, he admits, because he enjoys the work too much to keep out. That is a revealing detail about him. The co-CEO title suggests altitude; his attention keeps returning to the surface where a person taps, hesitates, reads, and decides. After two decades in fintech, he is still redrawing the trading screen. Only now the screen can answer back.