Vatic Labs (operating through the entities Vatic Investments LLC and Vatic Labs Operations LLC) is a quantitative trading firm and electronic liquidity provider headquartered in Midtown Manhattan, New York. It builds proprietary, machine-learning-driven trading systems, which the firm calls autonomous trading agents, to make markets and trade U.S. and international equity securities, including common stock, single-stock swaps and ETFs, alongside futures- and options-based strategies. The firm describes its staff as a mix of traders, AI researchers and technologists working on the same systems rather than in separate research and execution silos. Vatic specialises in statistical arbitrage layered with in-house machine learning research, a combination it uses to position itself apart from both pure high-frequency market makers and traditional systematic hedge funds. Founder and CEO James Chiu has said the firm's goal from the start was to build a collaborative research culture comparable to Renaissance Technologies. Its hiring reflects that framing: alongside traders drawn from firms including Jump Trading, Citadel, Two Sigma, Point72 and Goldman Sachs, Vatic recruits academic researchers and competitive-programming medalists into the same trading and research teams, a talent mix more associated with quant research shops than conventional broker-dealers. Chiu spent 2008 to 2013 trading S&P futures at Chicago's Jump Trading, where CME Group later found he had entered stock index futures orders he did not intend to have filled and cancelled them within roughly a second, conduct from August and September 2010 that violated exchange rules; CME fined him $155,000 and suspended his exchange trading privileges for two months, from March 3 to May 3, 2014, a matter he settled without admitting or denying wrongdoing. He went on to found Vatic. The firm later brought in Goldman Sachs veteran Todd Hohman as President in 2021, hired former Citadel and PDT Partners technologist Dave Handley as Chief Technology Officer, and appointed Dr. Li Deng as Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer in 2022. Public company trackers report Vatic raised $45 million in equity in 2024 at a $270 million valuation, and headcount estimates from company-profile sites cluster between roughly 30 and 50 employees. Vatic also tried to expand from proprietary trading into managing outside capital, registering a hedge fund vehicle and filing to raise a pooled fund in 2021, but public regulatory trackers show it held no client assets as of August 2023 and it later terminated its SEC investment-adviser registration in 2024. In early 2026 the firm faced a second lawsuit from a former senior employee over unpaid compensation: Rosen Kralev, its former director of trading, resigned on January 7, 2026 and sued in Delaware Superior Court days later, alleging Vatic paid only a fraction of a contractually guaranteed $1.5 million bonus and repeatedly blamed the shortfall on funding difficulties; Vatic disputed the claims and the case was moved to arbitration. A similar suit from former chief business officer Abiruman Subramanian, who said he helped raise Vatic's 2024 funding round and was dismissed shortly afterward, was filed in 2025 and also sent to arbitration.
