Five years ago, FIA welcomed nine technology startups from around the world to its annual Innovators Pavilion, a showcase held each November at FIA’s Futures and Options Expo in Chicago.
The Innovators Pavilion offers a select group of emerging companies the opportunity to present their solutions directly to senior executives and decision-makers from across the derivatives industry, including exchanges, clearinghouses, banks, brokers and trading firms.
With Covid restrictions in place in 2020, the Innovators Pavilion went fully virtual that year. Each startup pitched its innovation online, followed by Q&A sessions with judges from Citadel Securities, DRW Venture Capital, Goldman Sachs, Nasdaq and UBS.
Riskfuel won FIA Innovator of the Year, Options AI won runner-up and Wematch won the People’s Choice Award.
Since 2020, these firms and others in the competition have achieved significant milestones, from raising capital and expanding services to announcing high-profile client wins and, in some cases, being bought outright.
As FIA prepares for the 2025 Innovators Pavilion, MarketVoice looks back at some of the participants in the 2020 cohort and the key milestones in their growth in the intervening years.
OilX – AI-driven oil data analytics
Founded in 2018 by Florian Thaler, an oil analyst who worked at Shell and Citi, London-based OilX provides AI-driven oil data analytics and market intelligence. The Innovators Pavilion audience was impressed with the company’s real-time platform that offers ‘nowcasting’ capabilities, enabling clients to understand energy markets as they evolve.
OilX’s product range covers crude oil, refined products, biofuels and natural gas liquids. Its technology combines conventional oil statistics with real-time data from satellites and maritime intelligence to create accurate and timely insights into the market. This enables users to spend more time trading rather than analysing, and as a result, make faster, data-driven decisions, OilX says.
In 2023, the company was acquired by energy and macro research consultancy Energy Aspects, which said OilX’s real-time data and analytics would complement its own forward-looking analysis. OilX, in turn, gained access to Energy Aspects’ proprietary datasets and subject-matter experts, improving its data-driven insights to clients.
Most recently, in February 2025, OilX was recognised as an official OPEC secondary source for assessing crude oil production and output compliance. OPEC said it now incorporates OilX’s data into its Monthly Oil Market Report, underscoring the company’s growing role in global energy market analysis.
Options AI – Levelling the playing field for retail investors
New York–based Options AI, the 2020 Innovators Pavilion runner-up, was recognised for the intuitive design of its equity options trading app. Founded in 2017 by John Foley, Alex Griffiths and CC Lagator, the firm set out to make sophisticated options trading accessible to retail traders.
In 2021, the company raised $4.1 million in a funding round led by Akuna Capital, Optiver Principal Strategic Investments and Miami International Holdings, with participation from ViewTrade Holdings.
At the time, Foley noted that while technology had spurred a wave of active retail investing, it had not truly levelled the playing field. “With options, the focus has been on getting investors to their first trade, not improving access to more advanced trades. That puts retail investors at a disadvantage and is why we built Options AI to be the first platform where it’s as straightforward to trade multi-leg spreads as it is to buy a stock,” he said.
Since then, Options AI has continued to refine its platform and expand educational content for its users. Recent features like the “Expected Move” tool help traders to quickly gauge market expectations for a stock or index’s potential price range.
Riskfuel – AI for derivatives valuations
Riskfuel was named the 2020 FIA Innovator of the Year based on its solution to address the challenges of derivatives valuations. The Toronto-based company specialises in using artificial intelligence to accelerate complex valuation and risk calculations, which previously took hours using traditional models.
The company uses a type of deep neural network called a variational autoencoder to learn the space of all possible volatility surfaces for a particular asset class. Once trained, a variational autoencoder provides a fast, robust, and interpretable method that can complete volatility surfaces from partial information in real time.
For banks, the advantages were obvious: greater accuracy, a reduction in operating costs with one server running for minutes versus thousands running for hours, a smaller environmental footprint and new business opportunities.
Founded in 2019 by Ryan Ferguson, a quantitative analyst with experience in risk analysis, Riskfuel began its first pilot programme with Scotiabank that same year. In 2021, BMO Financial Group announced a partnership with Riskfuel to develop models for the pricing of structured derivatives transactions and to accelerate valuations of autocallable notes. More recently, Riskfuel has teamed up with Intel, which runs Riskfuel’s AI software on Xeon scalable processors, to deliver real-time insights for financial institutions.
“By running Riskfuel on Intel architecture, customers can accelerate their deep learning models, increase model accuracy and reduce run time while cutting computational costs to virtually zero,” Intel said. “At long last, traders can perform on-demand recalculations of portfolio values and gain an up-to-the-second view of risk without purchasing expensive, alternative compute architectures.”
Sylvera – Carbon data and analytics
London-headquartered Sylvera leverages proprietary data, machine learning technology and industry expertise to produce comprehensive and accessible insights into the carbon markets.
It is used by global corporations, financial institutions and governments to ensure that the carbon investments they make are legitimate and impactful. Audience members were impressed with Sylvera’s independent, in-depth and up-to-date project reports and market intelligence through its online platform and API.
“We provide carbon data that helps companies and countries drive investment to the most critical climate solutions that would otherwise go unfunded. We’re helping the world make real net zero progress,” the company says.
Earlier this year, Sylvera partnered with the United Nations Development Programme to launch the Carbon Data Access Partnership, providing African governments with insights on over 21,000 carbon projects to inform policy and investment decisions.
It also announced a strategic partnership with the Macao International Carbon Emission Exchange to enhance transparency and quality in Asia’s carbon markets, and a collaboration with BlueLayer aimed at channelling billions in funding toward vital carbon projects.
Co-founded in 2020 by Allister Furey and Sam Gill, Sylvera has expanded rapidly over five years, with offices in London, New York, Belgrade and Singapore. In 2023, it closed a €51 million Series B funding round led by Balderton Capital, with participation from Fidelity Strategic Ventures, Bain & Company, 9Yards Capital and existing investors. The company has raised nearly €100 million to date.
Wematch – Digitising voice-based trading
Winner of the 2020 People’s Choice Award, Wematch impressed the audience with its digital platform for automating matching, negotiation and lifecycle management of trades – from total return swaps to equity and interest rate derivatives.
Since then, Wematch has expanded rapidly, securing new funding, broadening its footprint and scaling user activity. In 2021, it raised $28 million in Series B funding led by Deutsche Börse’s DB1 Ventures, with participation from Barclays, JP Morgan, Société Générale, Augmentum Fintech, CE Innovation Capital and Illuminate Financial.
It has also expanded its geographical footprint. From its initial setup in Tel Aviv in 2017, it has added operations in London, New York, Paris and Hong Kong. A recent collaboration milestone was its tie-up with Eurex, which has led to interoperability between Wematch’s total return swaps module and Eurex’s basket total return futures products.
The Wematch platform has also seen substantial growth in user activity: from $150 billion in ongoing notional volume in early 2023, to $300 billion later that year, and surpassing $1.2 trillion by September 2025.
The company’s product suite includes total return swaps, FRM Optimiser, cash flow management, and the securities borrowing and lending trading platform for both general collateral and specials.
The company also has received regulatory approval from the US Securities and Exchange Commission in February 2025 to establish a “Security-Based Swap Execution Facility” for the trading of total return swaps.
Innovation in motion
Five years on, these companies reflect the dynamism of fintech innovation – from pioneering AI models and democratising retail access to transforming trading processes. As the 2025 Innovators Pavilion approaches, the experiences of these firms offer a snapshot of how fintech innovation continues to drive change across global derivatives markets.
