algorithmic-trading
(22)
Vijay Kedia and the freedom to trade your own way
Vijay Kedia built FlexTrade around a trader’s need for control. Thirty years after its founding, the same idea runs through a business connecting brokers, markets and increasingly complicated decisions.
FlexTrade puts the trader in control
A trading desk can have every market on its screens and still struggle to act. FlexTrade’s bet is that the connections between those screens matter as much as the intelligence inside them.
Istra Research turns tiny market clues into a business
Inside the quantitative trading firm where a statistical hunch must survive the journey from mathematics to silicon. The interesting part is how many different minds that journey requires.
Reed Werbitt and the Quiet Business of Making Crypto Tradable
Before digital assets became an institutional asset class, Reed Werbitt learned to move size without making a scene. Now Flowdesk's U.S. CEO and Global CRO is applying that old trading discipline to a market that never closes.
BMLL Cleans the Data Before the Quants Arrive
Every order, cancellation and execution leaves a trail. BMLL turns that unruly exchange exhaust into research-ready history, so expensive quantitative talent can investigate markets instead of repairing files.
The Quiet Machine Behind the Trade: Quod Financial Sells Control in a Market Built on Fragments
Quod Financial has spent two decades turning the messy mechanics of institutional trading into configurable software. Its wager is simple: the winning platform is not the one that does everything to you, but the one that lets you change everything without stopping the desk.
NinjaTrader Built a Futures Machine. Kraken Paid $1.5 Billion for the Plumbing.
A free charting tool became a broker, a clearing stack and, eventually, the bridge Kraken wanted between crypto and regulated futures. The clever part was not the candlesticks. It was owning more of what happened after a trader clicked buy.
Damián Scavo Is Teaching AI to Do the Homework of Money
Before financial AI became a category, Scavo had already spent two decades moving between code, markets and data. Streetbeat is his attempt to turn that unusual apprenticeship into an agent that can make financial work less manual - without pretending judgment has disappeared.
AYC Fund
AYC Fund is an AI-native crypto hedge fund out of Y Combinator's W22 batch, founded in 2021 by MJ Kim in Seoul. It builds systematic, rules-based trading engines for digital-asset markets and now runs a private, invite-only program for qualified clients - high-net-worth individuals, family offices, and advisors - where capital stays in the client's own exchange account and the fund trades through read-and-trade API access rather than taking custody.
Sergey Savastiouk
Sergey Savastiouk, Ph.D., is the founder and CEO of Tickeron, a Reno-based platform that pairs artificial intelligence with plain-language explanation to give self-directed investors and advisors trading signals, pattern recognition, and automated 'AI robots.' A former applied-mathematics professor at Santa Clara University with two prior startups behind him, he turned the losses of the 2008 crisis into a mission to hand retail investors the kind of algorithmic tools once reserved for institutions.
Spark Systems Pte Ltd
Spark Systems is a Singapore-based financial technology company building next-generation electronic foreign exchange (eFX) trading platforms. Its ultra-low latency aggregator and eFX solution platform give banks, hedge funds, central banks, sovereign wealth funds and corporate treasuries fast, resilient and cost-efficient access to FX liquidity, price construction, auto-hedging, risk control and white-label distribution. Founded in 2016 by veteran FX trader Wong Joo Seng, the company is backed by global institutions including HSBC, Citi and Goldman Sachs, and counts OCBC and ATFX among its partners.
Lime Trading
Lime Trading (Lime Trading Corp., operating as Lime Financial) is a New York-based broker-dealer that gives independent and institutional traders access to institutional-grade trading technology. Born in 2000 inside a quantitative hedge fund as Lime Brokerage, the firm built low-latency infrastructure for high-frequency trading and now offers direct market access, trading APIs, colocation, and proprietary web and mobile platforms for trading U.S. equities, options, and futures. It positions itself in the gap between bulge-bracket banks and retail apps, serving sophisticated traders and developers who want speed, transparency, and quality execution.
RQD* Clearing
RQD* Clearing is a New York-based correspondent clearing firm that provides clearing, custody, and execution services for broker-dealers on a cloud-native, real-time platform. Spun out of options market maker Volant, it self-clears U.S. equities, options, and ETFs, positioning itself as a modern alternative to legacy clearing providers with direct API integration, 24x5 availability, and infrastructure built on Microsoft Azure.
Eva Sehic
Eva Sehic is the CEO of Lime Trading, a New York agency broker that provides fast, scalable direct market access to US equities and options markets. She stepped into the top job in September 2024 after joining as COO a year earlier, and brings more than two decades of markets experience from Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and Sberbank's New York operation, where she served as COO and CEO. Known for pairing operational discipline with a bet on AI, blockchain and machine learning, she was named Excellence in Innovation winner at the 2024 Markets Media Women in Finance Awards and Vendor Professional of the Year at the 2025 Witad Awards.
Tickeron
Tickeron is an AI-driven financial marketplace that packages quantitative research into automated trading tools for retail and professional investors. Founded by PhD mathematicians, it builds pattern-recognition engines, trend-prediction models, and a growing fleet of AI trading robots powered by its proprietary Financial Learning Models (FLMs). The pitch: compress thousands of hours of investment research into minutes, and let non-experts trade on statistical probabilities instead of gut feel.
Christina Qi
Christina Qi is the CEO of Databento, an on-demand market-data platform for quants and asset managers, and a founding partner of Domeyard LP, one of the longest-running high-frequency trading hedge funds in the world. She started Domeyard from an MIT dorm room with $1,000 in savings, grew it to trade billions of dollars a day, then wound it down and built Databento to fix the broken market-data infrastructure that had frustrated her for a decade. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, MIT trustee, and financial-literacy advocate, Qi turned a rough start into a career spent lowering the barriers to Wall Street for everyone else.
Databento
Databento is a licensed market data provider that lets traders, quants, and developers pull live exchange feeds and decades of historical tick data through a single API with a pay-as-you-go model. Founded in 2019 by former quant hedge fund traders, it replaces the slow, expensive, contract-heavy process of buying market data with self-service access across 45+ trading venues and a unified data format.
Alpaca
Alpaca is a developer-first brokerage infrastructure company providing APIs and a self-clearing custody platform that lets fintechs, banks and trading apps embed access to US stocks, options, crypto and fixed income for customers in 40+ countries. Often called the AWS of finance, it powers more than 300 financial institutions and millions of brokerage accounts globally.
Hitoshi Harada
Hitoshi Harada is the Co-Founder, CTO, and CPO of Alpaca Markets - the fintech unicorn building what he calls the 'Global Financial OS.' A Keio University-trained computer scientist who rewrote parts of PostgreSQL (Window Functions, PL/v8), Harada spent years building distributed databases at Greenplum before co-founding Alpaca in 2015 with Yoshi Yokokawa. The company, named after an alpaca they spotted on a Silicon Valley billionaire's estate, has grown to command 94% of the global tokenized US equities market, serve 300+ financial institutions across 40+ countries, and reach unicorn status at $1.15B valuation with a $150M Series D in January 2026.
Yoshi Yokokawa
Yoshi Yokokawa is the co-founder and CEO of Alpaca, the San Mateo-based API-first brokerage infrastructure company that powers over 300 global fintech partners across 45 countries. A former Lehman Brothers analyst and forex trader turned repeat entrepreneur, Yoshi built Alpaca from a YC W19 startup into a $1.15 billion unicorn after raising a $150 million Series D in January 2026. His vision: a 'Global Financial OS' that makes investing borderless, accessible, and developer-native.
Peter Lee
Peter Lee is Chief of Staff to the CEO at Coactive AI, a San Jose-based enterprise AI platform that helps Fortune 500 companies search, tag, and analyze visual content using multimodal AI. He brings over a decade of experience across algorithmic equity trading at PEAK6, strategic consulting at Booz Allen Hamilton, and high-stakes M&A advisory at Guggenheim Securities - where he worked on transactions totaling more than $10 billion in enterprise value. A Wharton MBA and MIT Management Science graduate, Peter joined Coactive in 2025 as the company scaled following its $30 million Series B round.
Zoa Research
Zoa Research is a New York-based AI research lab building cross-domain quantitative forecasting models that generalize across finance, science, and beyond. Founded by Greg Volynsky and Sam Damashek - a Harvard Law/CMU duo and a Jane Street algorithmic trading veteran - Zoa trains LLM-powered multi-agent systems to automate the model-build-test-improve cycle. The result: forecasting engines that outperform narrow models in event prediction, deployed both as proprietary trading capital and as a Forecast-as-a-Service API for researchers, traders, and scientific labs. Backed by Y Combinator (S24), Zoa is building the infrastructure layer for probabilistic reasoning at scale.