April 08, 2008 06:00 ET
Marketcetera Closes $4 Million Series A Financing Led by Shasta Ventures
Proceeds to Expand Engineering and Marketing Operations
SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - April 8, 2008) - 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."
About Marketcetera
Marketcetera (http://www.marketcetera.com) is a provider of open source
software for automated trading systems. Portfolio managers can quickly
transform trading ideas and pricing rules into their own proprietary
algorithms that are embedded in the Marketcetera platform. The open source
foundation of the platform provides maximum flexibility and technology
choice to institutions of all sizes.