
An Intel engineer turned Wall Street trading chief started Pico with seven people in a downtown New York room. The consequential move was not going faster, but realizing the technology itself was the business.
Jonathan Birnbaum is the founder and CEO of OpenYield, a New York-based fixed income marketplace that brings an equity-like, fully automated trading experience to bonds. A former US credit trading COO at Morgan Stanley and fixed income execution lead at Bridgewater Associates, he later helped build consumer investing platforms as general manager of SoFi Invest and founding COO of Domain Money. He founded OpenYield in 2023 to make bonds cheap and easy to trade for retail investors, backed by a 2026 Series A of more than $6 million from investors including LeveL Markets, Draper Associates, Canapi Ventures and Clocktower Ventures.