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23. Gaurav Suri
Chief Executive Officer
Arcesium
Last year: 27

Rare is the start-up that has 300 employees and customers as prestigious as Blackstone Alternative Asset Management and D.E. Shaw & Co. on day one. That was the good fortune of Arcesium, a posttrade services specialist that D.E. Shaw spun out of its own operations in 2015 with a management team led by Gaurav Suri, who had been the renowned, high-tech hedge fund firm's head of information technology and software development. The venture's name is derived in part from "cesium," the chemical element used in atomic clocks, to connote operational precision.

Arcesium is growing at a healthy clip, offering a "cloud-based, co-sourced" service model that allows hedge funds to maintain control over treasury, operations, and accounting functions performed on the firm's state-of-the-art platform — while having access to staff expertise in accounting, operations, technology, and treasury. Head count has increased to 650, occupying expanded space in New York and Hyderabad, India, and assets supported have risen to $65 billion, from $40 billion at the start. Clients added over the past year include EJF Capital, an Arlington, Virginia–based alternative-asset management firm, with $5 billion under management; and Balyasny Asset Management, which has offices in the U.S., the U.K., and Hong Kong and $13 billion under management. Suri, 46, who has a master's degree in computer science from the University of Illinois and joined D.E. Shaw in 1996 from Bell Laboratories, says there are additional growth outlets: "We are in conversations with a broad array of financial players beyond hedge funds who could benefit from the platform, including private equity managers, traditional asset managers, and global custodians."

 
The 2017 Trading Tech 40

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6. Glenn Lesko Bloomberg Tradebook 7. Bryan Durkin CME Group 8. Mayur Kapani Intercontinental Exchange 9. Mike Blum KCG Holdings 10. Raj Mahajan Goldman Sachs Group

11. Ronald DePoalo Fidelity Institutional 12. Nick Themelis MarketAxess Holdings 13. Jenny Knott NEX Optimisation 14. Billy Hult Tradeweb Markets 15. Rob Park IEX Group

16. Bill Chow & Richard Leung Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing 17. John Mackay (Mack) Gill MillenniumIT 18. Paul Hamill Citadel Securities 19. Eric Noll Convergex 20. Veronica Augustsson Cinnober Financial Technology

21. Tyler Moeller & Joshua Walsky Broadway Technology 22. Alasdair Haynes Aquis Exchange 23. Gaurav Suri Arcesium 24. Manoj Narang Mana Partners 25. Michael Chin & Neill Penney Thomson Reuters

26. Robert Sloan S3 Partners 27. Anton Katz & Stephen Mock AQR Capital Management 28. Donal Byrne Corvil 29. Stu Taylor Algomi 30. Alfred Eskandar Portware

31. Steven Randich Financial Industry Regulatory Authority 32. R. Cromwell Coulson OTC Markets Group 33. Peter Maragos Dash Financial 34. John Fawcett Quantopian 35. Donald Ross III PDQ Enterprises

36. Jennifer Nayar Vela Trading Technologies 37. Dan Raju Tradier 38. Susan Estes OpenDoor Trading 39. David Mercer LMAX Exchange 40. Oki Matsumoto Monex Group