Moment raises $36M Series B led by Index Ventures to modernize fixed income trading infrastructure, lands LPL Financial partnership

Well, this was fantastic. Thank you so much for stopping by. Come back on again soon. Uh, stay safe out there with the contrarian and the crazy data results. Uh, still very bullish, but very exciting. Uh, and thanks for everything you do. We'll talk to you soon. Great chatting. Cheers, Joel. Bye.

Uh, up next we have a massive series B announcement from Dylan Parker. Moment HQ is coming in the building. We're going to ring the gong, baby. Index Ventures. Let's hear it from Dylan directly, though. Welcome to the stream, Dylan. Hope you're doing well today. How you doing? Great whiteboard, dude.

Some heavy lifting on that. See? Oh, yeah. Hopefully that's not proprietary information. That's secret trading algorithms or something. No, no, no, no, no, nothing too interesting. But uh thanks for having me on. Yeah. Thanks for stopping by.

Uh kick us off with the uh intro on yourself, the company, and then I want to hear about the announcement. Yeah. Yeah. So um I'm one of the co-founders of Moment. We are a fixed income trading so software company. So my backgrounds is as a quant researcher.

So like pretty much every quant researcher, I studied math and stats during college. That's where I met my co-founders Dean and Ammer.

And then after college, Deian and I both joined Citadel Securities and pretty much completely by chance, we ended up as the two junior members of the newly created automated marketmaking desk for corporate bonds.

And so so so at the time the the fixed income market, which by the way is financial market 50% larger than the global equities market, was undergoing an electronic trading revolution. And so Citadel saw this and said, "Well, we can go build an automated algorithmic marketmaking desk.

" So they hired this guy Anishh Kerat from Jane Street. It's like the godfather of fixed income automated trading.

They h they hired a bunch of super experienced bond traders and then they hired me and my co-founder and like basically our job was to take the knowledge in these bond traders heads and convert it into code.

And that was totally formative for a moment because that's when we realized like the power of electronic trading was going to be like everything that it enabled like smart order routing, portfolio optimization, all this stuff in the world's largest financial market that had just never been possible. Very cool.

Take us through the deal. What are you announcing? Yeah. So, we're announcing our $36 million series B was led by Couldn't hear you from the sound of the gong. Cut you off, but we like big numbers on the show and congratulations on a massive series B. Uh, you said from who? Index from from Yan Hammer at Index.

Very cool. Incredible. That's amazing. Incredible. Uh, where where should we go from here, Jordy? Yeah. Break uh so so I can imagine uh break down what what the company is focused on today. I'm it sounds like the origin is is back at your time at Citadel, but I imagine it's evolved as well. Yeah, totally.

So, what we what we saw at Citadel was that the market was coming online and you could now do all these things that were never possible before, but was what was missing was the operating system for actually doing that.

So we started moment with this goal of owning every mission critical workflow for traders and portfolio managers in the bond market.

Everything from how they trade securities and do smart order routing across all the different exchanges in the fixed income market to how they optimize portfolios to how they apply risk and compliance restrictions to make sure that they're not breaking any laws. And so that's what we do today.

We started off serving fintech. So we power fixed income for places like Weeble and Public. com and them to offer like $100 increment investing in bonds for the first time ever.

But uh yesterday we also announced our partnership with uh some of the largest financial institutions in the US including uh LPL Financial which is the largest brokerage dealer in the US. Wow. So busy week for you guys. Yeah, there there are a few things going on.

Um so where what what's the use of funds uh for the new round? What's what's the focus going forward? I imagine scaling what's working today? Uh are there new products coming? What can you talk about there? Yeah, so I think a lot of companies make the intelligent decision to start off like SMB or PLG.

We decided to like make things as hard as possible on ourselves. said, "We're going to start off serving the largest financial institutions in the world's most regulated market, and we're going to go power their mission critical workflows.

" And so, with a company like LPL or some of these others that we've announced over the last few weeks and that are coming down the pipeline in the next few weeks, the scale of what we're operating in is, you know, not like hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of flow, but like hundreds of billions of dollars in in trading flow.

And so what we're really focused on as a company over the next year is building out, you know, the full suite of what's necessary across trading, portfolio management, risk and compliance that's necessary to power these huge financial institutions.

What's the competitive dynamic like with the former employers or like the rest of the market participants? It feels like uh you know, Ken Griffin's not uh the the laziest founder out there.

Is is there is is there a world where there's some sort of competitive dynamic between the the big institutions where they want to build something like this to compete with you? So we when when we were at Citadel we were on the sell side. So market makers are liquidity providers.

Moment serves the buy side and we actually connect them with those liquidity providers. Got it. So we actually work closely with Citadel, Jane Street, uh pretty much all the major liquidity providers out there.

Uh how are you thinking talking about tokenization the the the you know story from the last month in in finance is the tokenization of of these sort of real world assets everything from private company shares to we've seen it with stocks.

Is there anything on the horizon on that front for you guys or is it just totally unnecessary? You know, I I think there's a huge opportunity, but if you look at where the fixed income market today is today, we're just going from like trading over the phone to going on an online platform to trade.

And so there's a lot still to do to get people to the point where it's even possible to think about stuff like that. Yeah.

Can you walk me through um like the the I I imagine that fixed income follows like a power law as well where like government debt and and Apple corporate bonds are way more liquid, way more automated than you know some like public company, but they're like junk bonds and you kind of got to hunt around for someone to buy and sell them.

And then you have like venture debt which basically I believe like never trades. I don't know. But walk me through like it feels like we are probably bringing more and more of those like subasset classes like into more liquid more um just just more automated markets.

But give me a state of the union on like how the fixed income market is actually like split up. So you're totally right. There's government bonds, there's highly liquid corporate bonds, and then there's a long tale of corporate and municipal bonds that are really, really illquid.

And just as a point of comparison that I think illustrates the size and scale of the fixed income market, there are 4,000 listed US equities and there are 4 million bonds. And so doing anything in the fixed income market is pretty much a thousand times more complicated than doing it in the equities market. Yeah.

Um and and and uh what about how does break down? So, so 4 million public equity or sorry 4 million bond how does that actually trade right now?

Like is it what is the make well what and what is the the ultimate like makeup of do certain companies account for you know break down like kind of how that 4 million is split up. Yeah.

So there's a universe of say 500 US treasuries that are super super liquid and they trade like similarly to the most liquid stocks out there.

And then on the other side you have a really really meaningful long tail that makes up the vast majority actually of the entire market share where you have bonds that haven't traded in 2 years or 10 years. Yeah.

And so one of the really hard parts about fixed income, one thing that I worked on as a quant researcher is like you have this bond that hasn't traded in three years. How do you optimize portfolio around that? How do you even figure out what the price of that bond is?

And that's why doing stuff in the fixed income market is like like the difference between equities and fixed income is like doing something on the surface of the earth and like doing something in space. Wow. Um, would be helpful to be a quant if you were going to build a company like this.

Yeah, you might need some math. Uh, well, I mean, that's all I have. Do you have anything else to Yeah. What What are you guys hiring for it right now? Yeah, pretty much everything. We're hiring quants. We're hiring engineers. We're hiring go to market, marketing, operations, pretty much everything out there. Amazing.

Awesome. Well, thank you for joining. Thanks for you'll be back on soon. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great one. Talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye. Next up, we have Eric Olsson from Consensus coming in with a big launch. Do we ring the gong for big launches? If there's a number attached, so we got to get DA.

We have to get it. We have to We have to get a prop that is non number oriented. We need more excitement oriented. But let's bring in Eric Olsen from Consensus and talk to him. How you doing, Eric? Great, guys. How you guys doing? Doing great. Great to have you.

Uh, kick us off with some uh intro on yourself, the background on the company, and then I want to talk about the launch. Hey K. So I'm Eric, founder of Consensus. Uh we are an AI search engine for academic and scientific research.

Um you know if you ever use like Google Scholar or PubMed back in the day at school, think of us as building the nextG 2025 LLM powered version of that