MerQube turns investment ideas into rules that run

Consider a list of thirty companies. Put ten in a group called Resources, ten in Financials and ten in Diversified. You have already made a decision about what a market should look like. Before anyone buys a share, before a fund receives a ticker, a set of rules has quietly taken charge. In May 2026, MerQube launched just such an index for South Africa. By July, an Oribi ETF tracking it was listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.

That sequence is a useful introduction to a company whose work usually sits several steps behind the thing an investor sees. MerQube designs, calculates and administers indices. Its customers include banks, asset managers, insurers and product issuers. The public sees the investment. The customer needs someone to make the arithmetic behave.

The people who knew the committee room

MerQube began in 2019 with Vinit Srivastava, Keith Loggie and Praveen Yalagandula. Srivastava had led strategy and volatility indices at S&P Dow Jones Indices. Loggie had chaired the S&P 500 Index Committee. Yalagandula supplied the founding technology leadership. This was a team familiar with both the rules and the systems required to apply them.

An index looks deceptively tidy from a distance. A number appears on a screen. Underneath are choices about eligible securities, weights, prices, dividends, rebalancing and exceptional events. Add options or intraday adjustments and the job becomes more demanding. Intel Capital’s account of the founding describes a response to customer needs the team had encountered at S&P Dow Jones Indices.

The company’s anniversary post recalls founders working at kitchen tables. It is an appealing image, though the more consequential inheritance was institutional experience. MerQube’s stated values include clarity and collaboration. In this business, those words have practical weight: a product designer and an engineer must agree on precisely what a rule means.

A recipe with a clock attached

The conventional broad-market benchmark answers a familiar question: how did this market perform? A custom strategy index can answer something narrower: what happened when a specified portfolio followed specified instructions? MerQube’s platform supports equities, futures, options and combinations of assets, with calculations ranging from the closing bell to real time.

Its architecture uses reusable building blocks and APIs. The attraction is understandable. If every new strategy requires a fresh software project, customization gets expensive to repeat. MerQube aims to reuse the underlying machinery while changing the investment instructions. On its website, it claims to build in days indices that peers take months to design. That is a company claim, rather than a universal delivery guarantee.

The Garage gives this approach a name and a workspace. Its public materials describe tools for custom equity baskets, single-stock return and decrement indices, options indices and client service. The tagline is economical: “Our Tools, Your Rules.” For an institutional product team, the benefit is a shorter path between specifying an idea and running an index.

One index, several ways to sell it

Calamos offers a concrete example. Its Autocallable Income ETF, CAIE, launched in June 2025. The fund uses the MerQube US Large-Cap Vol Advantage Autocallable Index, which represents a hypothetical portfolio of synthetic autocallable securities. The strategy’s reference asset is itself a MerQube index with variable exposure to E-mini S&P 500 futures.

The layers matter. MerQube supplies the index. Calamos supplies the fund. J.P. Morgan serves as swap counterparty. An investor buys ETF shares. Each participant performs a different job, and a familiar stock-market ticker can contain quite unfamiliar investment mechanics.

“The index has become the portable unit of product IP.”Vinit Srivastava, via MerQube’s LinkedIn

CAIE’s published annual operating expenses are 0.86% before waivers, or 0.74% after the stated waiver, under its April 2026 prospectus. Those are fund expenses, not MerQube’s price. Its coupons are conditional; barriers can be breached and losses can follow. Reliable calculation makes the contract legible. It does not make the investment safe.

The incumbents arrive with a cheque

MerQube’s commercial model combines index licensing, calculation and administration services with a cloud software platform. The value lies in helping institutions launch and maintain products without building every calculation system themselves. A demonstrated workload is UBS’s CMCI commodity family: MerQube reported taking on calculation and administration for more than 1,100 indices.

Funding followed. A $5 million Series A was announced in 2021, an $8 million round in 2022, and a $22 million Series B led by Intel Capital in 2023. April 2026 brought a Series C backed by 7RIDGE and Deutsche Börse. Public coverage reported $30 million; Deutsche Börse directly confirmed its own $15 million minority investment.

Deutsche Börse described MerQube as complementary to STOXX, its established index business. That is a revealing market position. MerQube competes for custom index work, but an incumbent can also see it as useful infrastructure. The investment supports a business centered on complex strategies, flexible schedules and self-indexing software.

What travels beyond Wall Street

The South African launch brings the story back to those thirty stocks. An index need not merely reproduce the market’s largest concentrations. It can express a different selection rule, provided the rule is documented and maintained. MerQube’s role was to supply the benchmark; Oribi and Prescient brought the investment product to market.

The copyable lesson is to separate the idea, its operating rules and its distribution. That separation lets specialists collaborate. It also clarifies the limits: ordinary broad-market exposure may require no bespoke index, and elaborate engineering cannot rescue an unsuitable investment strategy. MerQube’s opportunity begins when a customer has a precise idea and needs a dependable way to run it.