Adaptive develops trading technology for capital markets, including Aeron, its open-source technology for transmitting data with extremely low latency and high reliability, along with commercial products such as Aeron Sequencer and Aeron Exchange Accelerator. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Adaptive Co-Founder and CEO Matt Barrett to learn more about the company’s origins, the evolution of its trading technology, Aeron, and its plans for the future.
Matt Barrett’s Background
When asked about his background, Barrett shared:
I was born and raised in New Zealand before making the move to London twenty years ago. I studied computer science at university and began my career as a software developer across a range of different industries.
I launched Adaptive alongside my co-founders in 2012, and initially worked as a software engineer for the first few years of the company’s life before becoming CEO around 2018.
How Adaptive Started
When asked how the idea for the company came together, Barrett explained:
I met my co-founders, Loïc Rozé, Olivier Deheurles, and John Marks while working at a consultancy called Lab 49. We worked together on a project building an FX single dealer platform for Société Générale in 2010.
That experience stood out because we were treating software development as a team sport. It was highly collaborative, with almost minute-by-minute discussions of the work. Everyone was very open to learning and comfortable admitting what they didn’t know.
I’d never worked in an environment like it. We started Adaptive because we wanted to continue working in that way, and we felt the best way to do that was to build our own business.
The broader market context at that time gave us an edge. Post-2008, banks were being heavily regulated and looking for more efficient ways of delivering technology.
By bringing open source tools and agile methodologies into capital markets, particularly the front office, we were able to deliver complex projects far more quickly and cost-efficiently than in-house teams could.
We believed strongly in treating engineers as revenue generators rather than cost centers, and in combining deep technical expertise with genuine business domain knowledge.
That combination was relatively unusual at the time and gave us a real competitive advantage.
Favorite Memories
When asked about his favorite memory working for the company so far, Barrett said:
There are too many to list, but two really stand out.
The first was the moment we hired someone outside our own networks. It was someone we had found on LinkedIn who was using tools and approaches that resonated with how we worked.
We were genuinely worried they’d arrive and think we were all talking nonsense. Instead, they said it was amazing and that we were really onto something.
That was a huge moment because it proved to us that we were building something with broader appeal.
The second memory is an envisioning exercise we did with a coach about six years after we launched.
We collectively painted a picture of building trading systems for some of the most significant platforms in the world.
At the time, it felt very ambitious. We were still doing relatively small projects in a relatively small part of the market.
But when I look back now, that vision has been realized. Our technology underpins some of the largest exchanges and most critical trading platforms operating in the world today.
We don’t sit around and reflect on it as often as we should because we’re too caught up in the day-to-day, but it’s an important thing to remember.
Core Products And Features
When asked about Adaptive’s core products and features, Barrett detailed:
At the heart of what we do is Aeron, our open-source offering.
Aeron allows trading systems to send and receive data with extremely low latency and high reliability. Some of the capital markets firms using Aeron include the likes of Coinbase and Man Group.
On top of that, we’ve recently brought to market Aeron Sequencer, a commercial product that is designed to serve the needs of market participants as they replatform for the future, whether that’s driven by the cloud migration, AI adoption, new regulation, or broader market forces.
Aeron Sequencer allows the development of state machine replication at scale via a globally ordered, highly available message log, capable of processing millions of messages a second at microsecond latency.
It’s a unique proposition, and working with our early partners and clients to get that right is one of our key focuses right now.
Building And Scaling The Business
When asked about challenges Adaptive has faced in its sector, Barrett explained:
The biggest challenge we faced as founders was that all of us came from engineering backgrounds.
When we started the business, none of us knew anything about sales, marketing, finance, or how to scale an organization.
But the nice thing about that challenge was that it was impossible to deny and none of us pretended to know more than we did.
Very early on, we made a point of seeking out guidance from people who could help fill those gaps.
What I’ve learned over time is that finding good advice is in itself a challenge, but recognizing you need it is the first step.
I’ve also learned that the same advice can land completely differently depending on where you are in the business’s journey.
You can hear the same thing every year and take something entirely different from it each time.
That’s why long-term relationships with advisors matter so much. They understand how you and your business are changing, and their guidance evolves with you.
How The Technology Has Evolved
When asked how Adaptive’s technology has evolved since launching, Barrett said:
Adaptive has hugely evolved over the years.
Our initial offering was a hybrid proposal, both building technology and providing consulting services to support firms through their tech transformations.
Today, we build world-class trading technology as our primary focus. Our technology has made huge strides over the years to be able to achieve this.
We acquired Real Logic, the creators of Aeron, in 2022.
Since then, we’ve expanded the Aeron software suite and launched new products such as our Aeron Exchange Accelerator.
The Aeron Exchange Accelerator provides a core set of trading features out-of-the-box to help firms get started quickly, like order handling, validation, price-time priority matching, risk management, compliance reporting, and full audit trails, while delivering performance requirements: low latency, high throughput, and reliable uptime.
The Aeron Exchange Accelerator is especially exciting as we can license our clients the source code of their platform and grant them the right to make modifications, rather than offering a proprietary, closed, and highly prescriptive matching engine that remains under vendor control.
Key Company Milestones
When asked about some of Adaptive’s most significant milestones, Barrett highlighted:
The most significant recent milestone, and perhaps the most significant in the company’s history, is that we recently took our first external investment from Citi and HSBC.
I’m proud to say we had bootstrapped the business from four founders to over 300 people, but we reached a point where the business needed to take the next step.
A big part of that decision came from client feedback.
Clients were making increasingly significant bets on our technology, but they were cautious about moving their businesses onto our platform.
We were still a self-funded business without a significant balance sheet or credible backers behind us.
Some of them offered to become investors themselves which made for a very organic conversation.
Bringing in Citi and HSBC has given us real room to grow and execute on our vision, and it’s brought us fantastic partners who share our views and whose interests are genuinely aligned with ours.
Customer Success Stories
When asked to share specific customer success stories, Barrett said:
We have been lucky to work with some of the biggest and most exciting firms operating in the market.
A few of our recent builds include:
- *EDXM is a crypto exchange that built its institutional, cloud-native clearing and settlement platform on AWS in under 20 weeks and re-platformed its exchange in seven months, achieving zero unplanned outages in the year following launch and a median round-trip latency of 73 microseconds.*
- *Bullish is a crypto exchange that leverages Aeron and Google Cloud to enhance throughput, reduce latency, and strengthen security across its regulated digital asset exchange.*
- *Coinbase is a crypto platform that has launched multiple exchanges using Aeron to deliver the performance and resilience required for 24/7 global trading.*
- *Talos is an institutional crypto platform built on Aeron, exemplifying how open-source technology can support robust and efficient trading infrastructure.*
Total Addressable Market
When asked about the total addressable market Adaptive is pursuing, Barrett explained:
It’s believed anywhere between $20 billion and $40 billion a year is spent on market infrastructure and connecting market participants to enable them to trade.
Right now, there is a huge amount of rapid innovation happening in capital markets.
On the infrastructure side, exchanges are experimenting with moving into the public cloud.
On the regulatory side, a more ‘laissez-faire’ approach in the US is opening up new possibilities.
Add to that the innovation happening around prediction markets, tokenization, and 24/7 trading, and it all points to a market that is going to see enormous disruption over the next five years.
That is exactly the market we are positioning ourselves for.
Competitive Differentiation
When asked what differentiates Adaptive from its competition, Barrett said:
We take a very different approach from most trading technology providers, who tend to focus on shrink-wrapped offerings that solve a particular part of the financial markets infrastructure landscape.
We think of ourselves as bringing a platform to our clients that enables them to build and deliver their own technological solutions.
The way I describe it is this: we are for people who value differentiation via technology.
Lots of businesses use technology, but that doesn’t mean they’re competing on the basis of it.
We are specifically for the clients who want to compete on the quality and distinctiveness of their technology; who want ownership, control, and the freedom to innovate.
If they want to do something genuinely innovative and differentiating anywhere where there is low-latency electronic trading, then we are a very unique proposition.
We let our clients succeed on their own terms rather than constraining what they can go on to do.
Future Goals
When discussing Adaptive’s future goals, Barrett concluded:
We have a lot to deliver following our recent fundraising.
Our investors have invested in a plan, and we are working hard to execute on it.
We have specific capabilities on the roadmap that we are building right now, both for our clients and for the broader market.
A key focus is continuing to develop Aeron Sequencer and working closely with our early partners to get that right.
Beyond that, I want to continue building on our vision for the future of capital markets, explaining that vision clearly to the market, and maintaining our reputation for high-quality engineering.
That reputation as leading trading technologists is something we’ve worked hard to build, and it remains central to everything we do.
