VersiFi

A trading desk that refuses to touch your money

A hedge fund wants to put nine figures into crypto. Not as a bet - as an allocation. It needs to trade spot and derivatives, borrow against positions, route orders without moving the market, and prove every step to a compliance officer who has never trusted the word "DeFi." For years, the honest answer was: good luck. The infrastructure to do that the way you'd do it in equities simply didn't exist.

VersiFi exists to make that the boring part. From offices in New York and Abu Dhabi, the firm runs a single connection - it calls it "plug-and-trade" - through which institutions trade, borrow, lend, and settle digital assets. What it does not do is hold the assets. Custody sits with regulated third parties. That sounds like a footnote. It is, in fact, the whole argument.

The company is small - about seventeen people - and senior to a fault. Its leadership reads like a reunion of the people who built, and watched, the last cycle of institutional crypto. That is not an accident. It is the strategy.

The asset class grew up. The plumbing didn't.

By 2022, crypto had institutions interested and infrastructure that scared them off. Exchanges asked you to pre-fund accounts and hold balances on platforms with uneven controls. Lending desks blurred the line between your assets and theirs - a habit that ended several firms, loudly. Execution tooling that any equities trader took for granted - smart order routing, direct market access, a desk that picks up the phone - was patchy or absent.

The result was a market where the size was ready but the trust was not. Allocators could see the opportunity. They just couldn't get comfortable with the counterparty.

VersiFi's founders looked at that gap and saw something specific: the problem wasn't crypto. The problem was that crypto had been asked to reinvent market structure from scratch, badly, when traditional finance had spent decades getting it right. The fix wasn't more innovation. It was less - importing the discipline that already worked.

Hire the people who already learned the hard way

Sameer Shalaby is not a crypto native, and he would tell you that's the point. Before VersiFi he founded Paladyne Systems, an investment-management software company that Broadridge bought in 2011, then spent five years running HazelTree Fund Services. He builds the unglamorous machinery that funds run on. At VersiFi he co-founded the firm in 2022 and runs everything that isn't the trade itself - the low-latency platform chief among it.

The trade itself belongs to Martin Garcia, who joined as co-CEO when the Series A closed. Garcia was a Managing Director at Genesis and co-head of its trading and lending business. Genesis, for those keeping score, is the institutional crypto lender that imploded in the 2022 contagion. Hiring its former trading chief to rebuild the category is either bold or grimly logical. VersiFi's bet is that it's both: the person who watched the model break knows exactly which parts to never repeat.

Around them sits a deliberately gray-haired bench: co-founder Alexander "Sasha" Kouperman, a 27-year hedge-fund veteran; a CPTO with 25 years in fintech; a head of operations who came from the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority; and an advisory board stacked with prime-brokerage names. The collective resume is the product demo.

One door. Trade, borrow, lend, custody.

Plug-and-trade is the name and the thesis. An institution connects once - by API or through a high-touch desk - and gets a single point of access to the whole workflow. Bilateral OTC for size that shouldn't move a screen. Algorithmic execution and smart order routing for the systematic crowd. Direct market access for the latency-sensitive. Lending and borrowing for the leveraged. And custody, handled by regulated third parties, so the firm executing your trade is never the firm holding your keys.

That last separation is the design's quiet center. VersiFi is neither an exchange nor a custodian by choice. It makes money on execution and financing, not on sitting atop a pile of client assets. The multi-custodian model means a client can trade "out of custody" - assets stay where they're already safe while VersiFi moves the orders.

Eighteen months, two continents

Note the cadence: raise, buy the tech, get the regulator. The order tells you what they think actually matters.

The receipts, such as they are

VersiFi is young, so the proof is in the moves, not yet a decade of P&L. The Series A came from Hunting Hill Global Capital, whose CEO Adam Guren sits on the advisory board and put it plainly: the team has "the experience across trading, lending, and technology to help evolve digital assets market structure." Investors back narratives; this one bought the people.

The Ather Digital acquisition in May 2024 was the more telling signal. Ather was spun out of a systematic quant fund and built specifically for high-frequency digital asset trading. VersiFi didn't license the tech - it bought the company in an all-stock deal, folding in the engineers and an Abu Dhabi base. Then it went to the regulator. The ADGM's in-principle approval for DMA and OTC trading is the kind of credential that opens institutional doors a slick UI never will.

Make institutional crypto unremarkable

The stated goal is almost anticlimactic: give institutions a regulated, TradFi-inspired way to trade and lend crypto - spot, derivatives, financing - without the drama. No reinvention of finance. Just finance, with a new asset class plugged in where it belongs.

There's an irony worth sitting with. The most ambitious thing a crypto company can do in 2024 is be boring on purpose: segregated custody, real AML/KYC, a regulator's blessing, a desk that answers the phone. VersiFi is betting the next wave of institutional money flows to whoever makes digital assets feel least like an adventure.

Whoever owns the trust, owns the flow

Spot ETFs cracked the door. The next decade of institutional crypto won't be won by the flashiest token or the loudest exchange - it'll be won by whoever the compliance officer signs off on. The infrastructure layer, the plumbing, the part nobody tweets about: that's where the durable business is.

VersiFi is making a focused bet that prime brokerage, not custody and not exchange, is the position to hold. If institutional crypto matures into a real asset class, somebody has to be the regulated middle - executing, financing, separating roles cleanly. The firm wants to be that somebody. It's early, the competition is well-funded, and the regulatory map is still being drawn. But the thesis is coherent, and the people have done this before.

Return to the scene: the hedge fund with nine figures and a nervous compliance officer. The version of that story VersiFi is selling ends differently - one connection, a desk that picks up, assets that never leave a regulated custodian, and a trade that looks, finally, like every other trade the fund already makes. Not a leap of faith. Just a line item.

Go deeper

Founder conversations, the funding story, and the deal that took VersiFi global.

Find VersiFi