Front-office
This category covers customer-facing areas of the business including sales, trading, and research. Companies operating in this niche include Global Liquid Markets, an electronic securities financing trading platform, and Mercatus, a provider of alternative asset and investment management solutions. AlphaClone, meanwhile, uses a mix of human judgement and algorithmic number-crunching to generate and backtest investment strategies. Startups operating in this space typically take the form of marketplaces and platforms that create access to primary and secondary markets, or act as alternative exchanges for the purchase and sale of assets. Others, like Confluent, build general software to support sales and trading desks.