Abhi Pingle is a savvy trader. For a year and a half, he worked at Optiver, one of the top high-frequency trading firms. HFT shops employ traders known as quants who are highly skilled in programming and quantitative analysis. Mom-and-pop investors can’t hope to compete with quants’ trading know-how, but Pingle wants to change this. He and his two cofounders, brother Arijit Pingle and TK Kwon, have raised $20 million across two funding rounds to launch Theo, a trading platform that lets users earn money from strategies usually reserved for top-tier HFT firms.
The trio drummed up $4.5 million in March 2024 in a seed round led by Manifold Trading, a quantitative investment firm. And, one year later, the three raised $15.5 million in a second round led by crypto investor Hack VC and Anthos Capital. Other investors in their company include Flowdesk and Selini Capital, as well as individuals from firms like Citadel, JPMorgan, Jane Street, and Optiver.
The two rounds were for token warrants, or promised allocations of a yet-to-be-released cryptocurrency. Abhi Pingle, who’s 26, declined to specify his startup’s most recent valuation.
Theo, whose name is inspired by the trading term “theoretical price,” is part of the broader DeFi, or decentralized finance, ecosystem. DeFi apps promise users access to financial services like loans or crypto trading without the need to engage with centralized institutions like banks or brokerages. Investors and traders have parked $95 billion into DeFi protocols and apps as of Thursday, according to DefiLlama. Pingle, however, told Fortune that Theo plans to branch out beyond just DeFi.
He and his other two cofounders went to Northwestern University, where they studied computer science. The trio then went on to work at both Optiver and IMC Trading and left their HFT firms in 2022 to work on a DeFi-focused blockchain called Canto, which notched initial success before flagging during the depths of crypto’s most recent bear market.
In late 2023, the three decided to become founders themselves and start Theo. “We’re trying to minimize the actual decision-making or interactivity so that it’s as simple as just depositing—kind of like how you might deposit into your money market fund,” Pingle said.
The cofounders launched their trading platform in June and have let users deposit about $50 million into their protocol. Pingle said that, over the past three months, the average yield users have accrued is between 7% and 8%. And when measured over the last year, users, which include family offices and funds, have accrued between 18% and 20%.
The team plans to uncap the amount of funds investors can deposit by the end of April. And while their protocol has mainly interfaced with other popular DeFi apps like Aave and Hyperliquid, they plan to try out their trading strategies on centralized exchanges like Binance and Bybit. “I think longer term for us, we actually want to get integrated with more traditional markets as well,” he said.
