Former Citadel quants Raise $36 million for fixed-income fintech

Moment, a financial-technology company founded by former Citadel Securities quantitative traders and researchers, raised $36 million in a new round of funding from firms including Index Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz to further automate fixed-income trading technology.

The latest round of fundraising brings Moment’s total backing to $56 million, with Lightspeed, Venrock, Neo and Contrary Capital participating in the latest investment, according to a statement Wednesday.

READ MORE: Volatility breeds interest in fixed-income stability

New York-based Moment works with players in the asset-management and retail-trading sectors to modernize their fixed-income trading operations. The firm is already working with Webull and Public, for example, and on Tuesday announced a partnership with LPL Financial Holdings.

Moment is focused on centralizing and automating the core operations of the fixed-income market, something that allowed Webull customers last year to gain access to fractional bond trading for the first time, said Dylan Parker, one of Moment’s co-founders. He started the firm in 2023 with Harvard University friends Ammer Soliman and Dean Hathout, following stints at Citadel for both Parker and Hathout.

“Dylan, Dean and Ammer know fixed income inside and out — they’ve been pushing the boundaries in this space for years,” Jan Hammer, a partner at Index Ventures who will join Moment’s board, said in an email. “With Moment, they’re finally giving one of the world’s biggest financial markets the modern platform it deserves.”

READ MORE: The worst-performing fixed-income ETFs of the past 10 years

For one Moment customer in private-wealth management, Parker said, the firm whittled down a manual process that could take two hours to around 10 seconds by streamlining the hundreds of emails received from individual advisers. Those emails requested highly tailored fixed-income portfolios for clients, but Moment’s technology allowed the copying and pasting of those requests into a portfolio-management system, with optimized offerings generated in seconds, he said.

“We are not just powering tangential workflows,” Parker said, “but their most mission-critical workflows.”