OneChronos is a U.S. equities ATS designed from the bottom up to fundamentally address the growing gap between how trading venues match orders and how traders need to execute them. Pulse 2.0 interviewed OneChronos CEO Kelly Littlepage to gain a deeper understanding of the company.
Kelly Littlepage’s Background
What is Kelly Littlepage’s background? Littlepage said:
“I’m currently the CEO and co-founder of OneChronos, which launched in June 2022. Before founding OneChronos, I served as the CTO of Telnyx, worked as a systematic trader at Merrill Lynch in Hong Kong, and was Director of Microstructure at Crabel Capital. I’m also an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Green Visor Capital. My academic background is at the intersection of applied mathematics, computer science, and economics, and that mix plays a significant role in how I approach building systems and businesses.”
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea for the company come together? Littlepage shared:
“My co-founder Steve and I grew up together tinkering with systems, trying to understand how computer hardware and software worked at the lowest level. That persisted when we started our careers in seemingly unrelated fields (quantitative trading for me, distributed systems, and cybersecurity for Steve). We’d compare notes on what we were working on over beers and came to view capital markets as a high-stakes distributed system that the world wasn’t treating as one—like an alternate universe where relational databases were “best-effort,” forcing developers to spend all their time coming up with heuristics for bad data and race conditions instead of shipping products. We decided that going after a root-cause fix was a big opportunity, and we knew the technical path forward, so we got to work building it.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges has Littlepage and the team face in building the company? Littlepage acknowledged:
“Market volatility often correlates with higher trading volumes for ourselves and our peers but also means that our customers are busy and don’t have as much time to dedicate to integrating new products into their systems. We work to make a big point of doing everything possible to reduce friction against adoption, even if that means taking on technical complexity internally. We view getting from A to B as a series of gradual steps, pursuing a product roadmap where each step demonstrates immediate and measurable value for our clients while inching toward our ultimate goal of a new market structure we believe can unlock even more value for market participants.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Littlepage cited:
“We’re proud to say that OneChronos ATS was the fastest-growing off-exchange U.S. equities trading venue in 2024, and we’re looking to maintain that momentum in 2025. We’re facilitating an average of around $6 billion daily trading volume. This showcases our ability to operate at the speed and scale required by demanding electronic capital markets.”
Funding
When asking Littlepage about the company’s funding details, he revealed:
“We announced $32 million in additional expansion capital led by Addition in November 2024, following our $40M Series B round in September 2023 also led by Addition. We’re excited to use the funding to accelerate OneChronos’ growth in existing markets and expand into new ones, exploring opportunities beyond traditional capital markets.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Littlepage assessed:
“U.S. equities alone is a massive TAM – but it’s just our starting point. We see tremendous opportunities across capital markets and beyond, including the real economy, where smart markets and agentic AI are poised to unlock new efficiencies.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Littlepage concluded:
“Traditional capital markets match buyers and sellers using a double auction that matches the highest-priced buyer against the lowest-priced seller. We design and operate Smart Markets (an academic term) that allow buyers and sellers to express their wants and needs in a way that allows us to identify bilateral and multilateral trades that can result in individually and collectively better outcomes. The work behind the 2020 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, awarded to Bob Wilson and Paul Milgrom, laid the foundation for what we’re doing. Our first product, OneChronos ATS, validated our approach in capital markets. We’re accumulating millions of data points daily on how Smart Markets can produce mutually better economic outcomes than the limit order book—an auction format dating to antiquity.”
