Akuna Capital LLC is a proprietary trading firm headquartered in Chicago that specializes in options market making. It builds and runs its own trading systems, quantitative models and infrastructure rather than relying on third party platforms, and organizes around four core functions, trading, technology, quantitative research and operations, that work together to price and quote options and provide liquidity across listed derivatives, futures, indexes, commodities and cryptocurrency markets. Unlike an asset manager or hedge fund, Akuna trades only its own capital and manages no external client or investor money, a structure common among options market makers that lets the firm concentrate on internal research, risk management and proprietary technology rather than client reporting or fundraising. It competes with other large options and derivatives market makers, and distinguishes itself with an engineering heavy, fully in house build of its trading stack and with a hiring pipeline built around a well regarded internship and early career programme that it uses as its main route into full time trading, quant and technology roles. The firm was founded in 2011 by Andrew Killion and Mitchell Skinner; Killion, previously a partner at Optiver, relocated from Sydney to Chicago to start the business, and the Akuna name comes from an Australian Aboriginal word meaning flowing water, a reference to the liquidity the firm provides. Beyond its Chicago headquarters at 333 South Wabash Avenue, Akuna operates offices in Sydney, Shanghai, London and Singapore. Wikipedia reports headcount at roughly 580 employees as of 2022, and the firm maintains an affiliated broker dealer, Akuna Securities, registered with FINRA. Bloomberg has reported that Akuna paid among the highest monthly intern salaries in the financial sector from 2021 to 2022. In 2023 the firm went through publicly reported workforce reductions, cutting about 11 percent of its global headcount in January and roughly 40 percent of its Asia Pacific staff in June, in the period after losses tied to cryptocurrency and startup investments reported for 2019; no more recent operational developments were found in this research pass.
