< The 2016 Tech 50

A $20.5 million Goldman Sachs Group investment last year brought more than monetary value to New York–based Perseus: The stake enhanced the Wall Street cred of a fast-growing, then-six-year-old venture selling high-performance communication and connectivity services to the most-demanding traders, exchanges and other financial market participants. And with the capital Perseus accelerated expansion of what it describes as the world’s largest software-defined network, reaching more than 70 markets on six continents. Since completing a Mumbai-London link in January, “we now circumnavigate the globe,” says founder and CEO Jock Percy. Nearly all of the 20 biggest banks are Perseus customers, and revenue is growing 30 to 40 percent annually, the 42-year-old New Zealand native and rugby enthusiast reports. Financial services firms account for nearly 80 percent of the business, with the rest coming from e-commerce, gaming and media. In May, Perseus announced a deal to deliver over its LiquidPath infrastructure the Nasdaq TotalView real-time data feed, as well as access to U.S. equity and Treasury markets, the last through the Nasdaq-affiliated eSpeed ITCH platform. Positioning Perseus to play a fintech-supporting role, Percy sees the managed-services architecture ensuring efficient processing of payments from apps and mobile devices. “We know stocks trade in milliseconds,” he says. “For a consumer with, say, an Apple device, the payment has to be under 30 seconds for a satisfactory user experience.” He believes that digital currencies and blockchain could get a similar boost with Perseus’ “Wall Street–grade” offering; trades processed by capital markets blockchain developer Noble Markets, a Perseus customer, represent “a great use case for us.” Noting that “latency jitter” is inherent in the public Internet, he adds, “If you can make applications faster and transaction times orders of magnitude faster, then everybody wins.”

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The 2016 Tech 50

1. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. 2. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange 3. Lance Uggla Markit Market Volatility May Boost Distressed Credit Opportunities Sponsored by Fidelity Investments May 12, 2025 4. Phupinder Gill CME Group 5. Shawn Edwards and Vlad Kliatchko Bloomberg 6. R. Martin Chavez Goldman Sachs Group

7. Robert Goldstein BlackRock 8. Adena Friedman Nasdaq 9. Deborah Hopkins Citi Ventures 10. Daniel Coleman KCG Holdings 11. Stephen Neff Fidelity Investments 12. David Craig Thomson Reuters

13. Michael Spencer ICAP 14. Michael Bodson Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. 15. Charles Li Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing 16. Chris Concannon BATS Global Markets 17. Blythe Masters Digital Asset Holdings 18. David Rutter R3CEV

19. Neil Katz D.E. Shaw & Co. 20. Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets 21. Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings 22. Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings 23. Robert Alexander Capital One Financial Corp. 24. Brad Katsuyama IEX Group

25. Antoine Shagoury State Street Corp. 26. David Gledhill DBS Bank 27. Lou Eccleston TMX Group 28. Andreas Preuss Deutsche BÖrse 29. Dan Schulman PayPal Holdings 30. Scott Dillon Wells Fargo & Co.

31. Mike Chinn S&P Global Market Intelligence 32. Craig Donohue Options Clearing Corp. 33. Gary Norcross Fidelity National Information Services 34. Steven O'Hanlon Numerix 35. Sebastián Ceria Axioma 36. Michael Cooper BT Radianz

37. Tyler Kim MaplesFS 38. Neal Pawar AQR Capital Management 39. David Harding Winton Capital Management 40. Chris Corrado London Stock Exchange Group 41. Brian Conlon First Derivatives 42. Jim Minnick eVestment

43. Stephane Dubois Xignite 44. Mazy Dar OpenFin 45. Yasuki Okai NRI Holdings America 46. Kim Fournais Saxo Bank 47. Jock Percy Perseus 48. Robert Schifellite Broadridge Financial Solutions

49. Brian Sentance Xenomorph Software 50. Pieter van der Does Adyen