The 2015 Tech 50: Sebastián Ceria

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< The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge

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Sebastián Ceria
Chief Executive Officer
Axioma
Last year: 47

Corporations consuming technology services are not the only ones benefiting from the cost, capacity and flexibility benefits of cloud computing. It is also a boon to developers and suppliers of quantitative software like Axioma. CEO Sebastián Ceria says it is an essential example of “technological modernity,” without which his New York–based portfolio systems and analytics shop would be having a very hard time satisfying its global customer base of 200 financial institutions, including 12 of the top 20 asset managers. “The cloud is a gigantic data center for which we don’t pay fixed costs,” explains Ceria, a Carnegie Mellon University Ph.D. in operations research who started Axioma in 1998 as a mathematical modeling consulting firm and in 2001 veered into software vending, specializing in portfolio optimization. Five years later Axioma moved into the risk management systems market, and by relying on new-generation technological advances — automated programming and data management tools, as well as the highly scalable cloud — it could more readily invest in the intellectual property, organizational agility and client focus that Ceria believes define Axioma’s competitive and innovative edge. “We had the advantage of coming into the market later,” the 50-year-old admits. Incumbent rivals in the risk software business, in common with many banks, were “stuck with ten- to 15-year-old systems and couldn’t change fast enough,” he says. “That creates opportunities for companies like ours.” Privately held Axioma’s top-line revenue is growing 20 percent annually, Ceria says, and its employee count, now 140, is increasing at an even faster clip.

See the full story, “The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge.”

The 2015 Tech 50