The ground-breaking Lucera platform enables customers to accelerate time-to-market, high speed connections to marketplaces and exchanges, and reduce operational and regulatory risk while eliminating the capital expense of building and operating a real-time network of customer and exchange connectivity.

"High frequency trading firms, exchanges, banks and hedge funds can reap huge savings and achieve significant improvements in performance by operating their infrastructure on Lucera," said Jacob Loveless, CEO of Lucera. "Our customers are able to reach new levels of performance by freeing themselves from the time and capital constraints of internal legacy infrastructure. By using Lucera, clients will be able to connect to more customers and liquidity destinations with much better performance at significantly lower cost."

Lucera's customers can efficiently procure, test, manage, implement and monitor trading infrastructure without expending capital on network technology. Lucera's on-demand custom infrastructure enables users to adjust the level of dedicated resources at any time at any of three collocated data centers. Month-to-month pricing allows customers to easily deploy or test new components and strategies without long-term contracts or commitments.

"Lucera was created to help customers address today's expensive, complex and evolving infrastructure needs. Lucera's platform currently operates out of New York, London and Chicago, enabling our customers to connect to multiple trading destinations fast, securely, and cost-effectively," Mr. Loveless added. "Our platform was designed by traders for traders, so we understand it must be ready to execute real-time. We help clients remove the barriers of capital investment, connectivity and time-to-market so they can focus on doing what they do best, generating revenue."

Ethan Kahn, Principal of Lucera customer Wolverine Trading LLC said, "We're always looking for new and innovative ways ways to increase our market reach and reduce operational costs. Lucera has given us a new and improved way to manage, deploy and scale our systems, particularly in the highly fragmented FX market. We now focus on developing systems to enhance market liquidity, while Lucera helps us manage the underlying infrastructure at low cost and in real-time."

Lucera's key features include:

• Connectivity - Access to any bank, ECN, marketplace or customer is accessible via high-speed, high performance dark fiber cross connects for virtually unlimited global connectivity and trading, enabling customers to create high-speed connections between financial destinations with no downtime or scheduled firewall suspension.
• Speed - Lucera runs on 17,000 miles of the fastest divergent transcontinental fiber, collocated in premier datacenters in New York, London and Chicago which deliver best in class speed and throughput.
• Network - Lucera's independently owned infrastructure includes a 100% software-defined network built atop Lucera's high speed custom-built routers.
• Performance - Lucera runs a customized version of SmartOS, which is engineered to provide bare metal performance for customers' on-demand machines and an industry leading virtualization performance for Linux or Windows.
• Security - Each Lucera client receives exclusive access to resources using Lucera's patented and patent pending allocation models. Lucera clients retain root level access, enabling compliance with their internal security guidelines.
• Ease-of-use - A Web-based, customer-administered user interface gives multiple sanctioned users easy access to instantly provision cloud machines and create connections from a tablet or desktop for maximum access and operational efficiency.