The LSE Directory / Data providers
Exegy is a financial technology company based in St. Louis, Missouri, that builds hardware-accelerated market data and trading infrastructure for institutional trading firms. Its core products include FPGA-based ticker plants (the Exegy Ticker Plant and the newer Nexus managed FPGA platform), the software-based nxFeed market data system, the Axiom consolidated data-as-a-service feed, and the Signum family of predictive trading signals (Quote Vector, Quote Fuse, Liquidity Lamp) built to anticipate near-term price and liquidity moves. The company was founded in 2003 to commercialize FPGA-based hardware acceleration research out of Washington University in St. Louis's engineering school, and shipped its first commercial ticker plant appliance in 2006. Exegy specialises in nanosecond-scale processing: normalising and distributing raw exchange feeds through purpose-built FPGA hardware rather than pure software, which is its main technical differentiator against software-only market data vendors. Its customer base spans exchanges and trading venues, market makers, proprietary trading firms, agency and retail brokers, hedge funds, and asset managers across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Following its 2021 merger with Vela Trading Systems, the combined firm also offers order execution and connectivity products, including Vela's Metro automated options trading platform integrated with Exegy's FPGA-based volatility engine. The company in its current form dates to a May 17, 2021 merger between Exegy and Vela Trading Systems LLC (originally founded in 1997 as Wombat Financial Software), backed by Marlin Equity Partners; James O'Donnell, an early Exegy investor and CEO since 2005, led the combined company at the time of the deal. Exegy has continued to grow by acquisition since: it bought Paris-based FPGA specialist Enyx in May 2022, and announced the acquisition of NovaSparks Inc., another Paris-based FPGA market-data normalisation and distribution vendor, on January 14, 2026. The company holds over 175 patents dating back to 2003. It was selected by FINRA CAT LLC in December 2019 to provide high-precision historical market data capture for the U.S. Consolidated Audit Trail, using GPS-synchronised data capture appliances co-located in Secaucus, New Jersey. Its Axiom feed covers more than 300 venues spanning equities, derivatives, and fixed income, and clients cited in company materials include Aquis Exchange, OneChronos, Deribit, Bookmap, and BMLL. David Taylor, who holds a doctorate in computer engineering and is named as an inventor on more than 75 patents, has served as CEO since March 2023. In June 2026 Exegy extended Axiom's coverage to several Middle Eastern exchanges, including Saudi Arabia's Tadawul (TASI), the Qatar Stock Exchange, Kuwait's Boursa Kuwait, Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange, and Dubai Financial Market, on top of existing coverage of the Johannesburg, Tel Aviv, and Istanbul exchanges. The NovaSparks acquisition, announced the same year, was framed by CEO David Taylor as a continuation of the consolidation strategy begun with the Vela and Enyx deals, aimed at combining performance and intellectual property across the merged product lines while maintaining NovaSparks's existing customer base and products.
