Sameer Shalaby

His latest company, VersiFi, opens with three words most crypto startups would never put on a banner: separated, integrated, regulated. It reads less like a pitch deck and more like a reprimand. In a market that learned the hard way what happens when the firm holding your coins is also the firm trading them, Shalaby drew a line through the middle. VersiFi runs trading and lending, and hands custody to third-party partners. The whole architecture is an argument: keep the things that can blow up apart from each other.

VersiFi launched in 2022 and lives at 122 East 42nd Street in Manhattan - a building, fittingly, named after the railroad money that built the city. It is a digital-asset trading and lending firm aimed squarely at institutions: hedge funds, asset managers, the kind of clients who read a custody agreement before they read the marketing. The product is a single point of access for trading, borrowing, and lending, with custody handled by outside partners so no one entity sits on both sides of the trade. Shalaby calls it a high-tech platform with high-touch service. The translation: software that moves fast, with humans who pick up the phone.

To understand why a software lifer ended up here, rewind. Shalaby did not arrive in finance through a trading floor. He arrived through code. He started his career at Oracle, on the core technology team, back when "the cloud" meant weather. In 1993 he co-founded TenFold Corporation, a vertical-applications company, and rode it through a string of technical and executive roles to a 1999 IPO. That is the formative pattern: build the unglamorous engine, then watch what gets built on top of it.

The companies kept coming. In 2002 he founded Cogency Systems, which made operational management and accounting software for investors. In 2005 he founded Paladyne Systems, an investment-management solutions provider, and ran it as CEO until 2011, when Broadridge Financial Solutions bought it. He stayed on as president through 2013 - the founder who does not bolt the moment the check clears. Each business pointed at the same target from a slightly different angle: give serious money managers software they can actually run their operations on.

Then came HazelTree. In May 2016 he was named President and CEO of the treasury-management firm, brought in to lead its expansion. He did. Under his tenure HazelTree added more than 200 of the world's largest hedge fund and private equity managers as clients. Treasury management is about as far from crypto's neon as finance gets - it is cash, collateral, counterparty exposure, the careful accounting of where money sits and what it is exposed to. Which is exactly the muscle that turned out to matter when he looked at digital assets.

That is the thread. Shalaby's whole career has been about the back office - the risk, the collateral, the settlement, the part nobody tweets about. Crypto spent its first decade obsessed with the front: the price, the launch, the moonshot. His bet with VersiFi is that the industry's second decade belongs to whoever takes the back office seriously. Counterparty risk is not a footnote in his world. It is the product.

He does not run it alone. VersiFi uses a co-CEO structure, and the split tells you how Shalaby thinks. He oversees everything that is not trading and sales - the platform, operations, the machinery. Martin Garcia, a former managing director at Genesis, runs sales, trading, and lending. It is a deliberate division of labor between a builder and a markets operator, the engine and the desk. The man who spent decades on the plumbing kept the plumbing, and brought in someone who lives on the floor to run the floor.

The $10 million Series A landed in November 2023, led by Hunting Hill Global Capital. The timing was pointed. The raise came in the long shadow of a brutal year for crypto, when "institutional-grade" had stopped being a buzzword and started being a survival requirement. The capital went into a low-latency technology platform paired with experienced market professionals - high-tech and high-touch, the same phrase, the same idea.

Then VersiFi did the thing Shalaby has done before: it bought to build. In 2024 the firm acquired Ather Digital, a trading-technology startup. For a founder whose own company once got acquired by Broadridge, the move had a certain symmetry - he has been on both sides of that table, and he knows what a clean integration looks like versus a messy one.

What makes him unusual is not any single company. It is the refusal to stop. Most founders get one good exit and become investors, advisors, names on a board. Shalaby keeps starting over. TenFold, Cogency, Paladyne, HazelTree, VersiFi - a thirty-year run of building the same kind of thing for the same kind of customer, each time aimed at whatever frontier the money was nervously circling next. He also invests in and advises software startups, but the day job is always the same verb: build.

There is a quiet discipline in how he frames the work. Notice what he does not say. He does not promise outsized returns or a revolution. He talks about a "stronger market environment," about participants "working together to minimize risk," about a "robust market structure." That is the vocabulary of someone who has watched markets break and rebuild several times, and who knows the difference between a fast company and a durable one. The verbs are collective and the timeline is long. In a corner of finance addicted to the next twelve hours, that patience is almost contrarian.

The co-CEO arrangement deserves a second look, because shared command is the structure most founders refuse. Ego usually wins. Shalaby's choice to wall off trading and sales under Martin Garcia, while keeping the platform and operations himself, reads as a confession of self-knowledge: he is the builder, not the trader, and he hired the trader rather than pretending to be one. Garcia's pedigree matters here too. He came out of Genesis, a name that once sat near the center of crypto lending and later near the center of its unwinding. Pairing a TradFi-grade builder with a battle-tested markets operator is the human version of "separated, integrated, regulated" - two specialties, kept distinct, joined at the top.

Geography is part of the story as well. VersiFi is a New York company in a sector that often prefers the regulatory daylight of Switzerland, Singapore, or the Gulf. Choosing midtown Manhattan, with its compliance scrutiny and its proximity to the very institutions VersiFi courts, is itself a positioning statement. The firm's keyword cloud reads like a TradFi prime broker that happens to trade crypto: direct market access, algorithmic execution, segregated custody, AML and KYC compliance, portfolio analytics, trade settlement. These are not the words of a company chasing retail hype. They are the words of a company auditioning for an institutional mandate.

He holds a B.S. from The George Washington University and an M.S. from MIT, which is the kind of credential that explains the engineer's instinct underneath the executive title. He talks about ecosystems and market structure the way an architect talks about load-bearing walls - not as abstractions, but as the things that decide whether the building stands. In an industry that loves the word "disruption," Shalaby keeps quietly using a different one: responsibly. It is a strange word to anchor a crypto company on. It is also, after everything, the whole point.