institutional-trading
(5)
Coinbase
How a Y Combinator startup that let people buy $5 of Bitcoin became the first crypto company in the S&P 500 - and why it now wants to be the exchange for everything.
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.
Transient.AI
Transient.AI is a New York-based fintech startup building what it calls a Trusted AI Operating System for capital markets - a compliant, explainable intelligence layer that unifies fragmented legacy systems for hedge funds, asset managers, RIAs, and sell-side trading desks. Founded by former traders and technologists from Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, UBS, and McKinsey, the company ships a suite of enterprise SaaS platforms (Caddie.AI, ClarityRIA, CapFlo.AI, Sales+) plus specialized AI agents for trade ideas, surveillance, AML, and term sheets. In May 2026 it raised its Series A led by NEXT Investors to scale deployment inside regulated financial institutions.
Kalshi
Kalshi is a New York-based, CFTC-regulated financial exchange where people trade contracts on the outcomes of real-world events - elections, economic data, sports, weather, corporate events and culture. Founded in 2018 by MIT classmates and former quant traders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara, it became the first U.S. exchange federally approved to list event contracts. By 2026 it accounts for the large majority of U.S. prediction-market activity, has raised roughly $2.6 billion across its rounds, and was valued at $22 billion after a $1 billion Series F.
Kraken
Kraken is one of the oldest and largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, founded in 2011 and launched in 2013 by Jesse Powell after the Mt. Gox security failures convinced him crypto needed an exchange built on trust. Operated by parent company Payward, Inc., Kraken lets retail and institutional clients buy, sell, trade, stake, and self-custody dozens of digital assets, alongside crypto futures, margin, and index products. By late 2025 it served over 5 million funded accounts, held tens of billions in client assets, and was preparing for a public listing.