Marketcetera, developer of open source platforms for automated trading systems, today announced it has raised $4 million in a Series A round led by Shasta Ventures and Jack Selby, managing director and co-founder of Clarium Capital, a $5 billion global macro hedge fund based in San Francisco.
With angel investors rounding out the funding, Marketcetera will use the proceeds to expand engineering and marketing operations.
Founded by Toli Kuznets and Graham Miller, veterans of the software and trading technology industries, Marketcetera is using open source software and methodologies to give financial institutions an alternative to expensive, monolithic proprietary trading systems. The company's comprehensive software platform enables financial services firms of any size to build effective algorithmic trading systems, develop proprietary algorithms, create order management solutions and manage risk, in order to gain competitive advantage.
"Open source software has marched across a number of industries, disrupting the legacy profits of proprietary vendors," said Ravi Mohan, managing director, Shasta Ventures. "Our investment will help Marketcetera provide trading firms a low-cost, scalable solution that better meets their needs than the expensive proprietary, trading platforms that they currently have access to. Marketcetera's platform powers algorithmic trading and experts in the industry predict that 50-to-60% of total trading will be done by algorithms by the end of the decade."
Mohan and Selby will both join Marketcetera's board of directors.
"The $500 billion under management in high-frequency quantitative strategies will only expand as the speed of the capital markets accelerates. Increasingly, traders and portfolio managers need the flexibility, throughput and power of open source software because of the advantages it provides over closed solutions," said Graham Miller, CEO, Marketcetera. "We're honored to have a firm with the reputation of Shasta Ventures recognize the business we've built and the opportunity we have to change this market."