St. Louis, MO, New York, NY and London – May 20, 2021 – Exegy Incorporated, the market leader in low-latency solutions for global market data, predictive trading signals, and hardware-acceleration technology, and Vela Trading Systems LLC (Vela), a leading provider of data and execution technology for global multi-asset electronic trading, announced today that they have merged business operations in an agreement backed by Marlin Equity Partners, a global investment firm with over $7.5 billion of capital commitments under management. Operating as Exegy Incorporated, the combined company creates a dominant provider of premier data and execution platforms, anaged services for electronic trading powered by proprietary hardware-acceleration, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and service automation technologies.
“Exegy’s combination with Vela represents an exciting growth opportunity for our respective companies,” said James O’Donnell, CEO of Exegy. “The merger provides immediate and tangible benefits to our customers and the marketplace in the form of a broader product set built on superior technology and supported by a global service team and delivery system.” The integrated market data product portfolio addresses the full spectrum of latency requirements from nanoseconds to global distribution, covers over 300 direct feeds, and offers flexible deployment models from embedded software to hardware appliances and consolidated, normalized feeds.
Exegy is committed to integrating core market data solutions to a common, cutting-edge technology platform. The platform will serve as a foundation for supporting the current market data product portfolio and delivering new offerings that leverage Exegy’s hardware-acceleration and artificial intelligence technologies. With an intellectual property portfolio totaling 175 patents, a strong history of innovation and thought leadership, and the significant scale and breadth of the combined organization, Exegy is uniquely positioned to continue expanding its suite of products to better serve the changing trading and technology needs of its global and prestigious customer base.
Exegy is also committed to maintaining the combined portfolio of application programming interfaces (APIs) currently used by customers. “We look forward to enhancing the user experience, coverage, and capabilities for all of our customers – from our SuperFeed clients consuming global market data using MAMA to our software feed handler customers using the SMDS API,” said Jen Nayar, who will serve as Chief Integration Officer and lead the efforts to integrate Vela’s products with Exegy’s technology and service delivery platforms. “A guiding principle for our integration plan is to minimize customer effort, while maximizing the performance and service benefits that we deliver,” added Nayar. Integrating core products to a common platform allows the combined company to leverage Exegy’s global service automation and delivery technology.
In addition to creating a comprehensive portfolio of products and services for real-time market data, the combination aligns Vela’s complementary businesses in automated trading and direct market access (DMA) platforms with Exegy’s strategic investments in predictive trading signals and hardware trading platforms. The integration of Vela’s Metro and Exegy’s Xero will create a vertically integrated derivatives trading platform with the fastest available speeds. Users of Vela’s Metro automated trading platform for options will have the ability to execute their strategies in less than 120 nanoseconds with Exegy’s FPGA-based Xero Volatility Trading Engine (VTE). Users of Vela’s execution gateways and DMA Platform will have access to Exegy’s Signum portfolio of predictive trading signals to enhance execution quality and identify new alpha opportunities.
“Simply stated, the two companies’ portfolios and their underlying technologies complement each other extremely well. This prepares us to offer a technologically superior set of products and a premium service experience to our customers,” said O’Donnell. The combined company will be led by an integrated executive team with James O’Donnell continuing as CEO of the organization and Jen Nayar will serve as Chief Integration Officer. The company’s headquarters remain in St. Louis, Missouri. With offices in New York, Chicago, London, Belfast, Manila, Hong Kong, and Singapore, Exegy’s global footprint will be well positioned to serve its customers’ expanding needs.
The transaction has closed effective May 17, 2021.