ABEX Raises $6M From MMC Ventures to Build Institutional-Grade Algorithmic Trading for Digital Assets

March 17, 2025

ABEX, a London-based fintech company providing algorithmic best execution solutions for digital asset markets, has announced a $6 million investment from MMC Ventures. The capital will be used to scale developer and research teams, advance the company's core execution technology, and expand its product suite into matched principal trading and derivatives execution. ABEX is led by CEO Erkan Kaya, a veteran of algorithmic trading at JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley with deep expertise in building and scaling high-frequency and ultra-low-latency trading businesses at top-tier investment banks, and co-founder Christian Gressel, who brings two decades of experience in derivatives sales trading and electronic trading from JP Morgan and UBS.

Institutional adoption of digital assets has accelerated significantly, yet the market infrastructure available to institutional buyers has lagged badly behind traditional asset classes. Crypto markets remain fragmented across centralised exchanges, electronic communication networks, market makers, and over-the-counter desks, with liquidity dispersed in ways that make efficient execution far more complex than in equities or fixed income. Best execution — a regulatory requirement in traditional finance, not a discretionary objective — has been largely absent from crypto, leaving institutional investors exposed to suboptimal fill rates, excessive market impact, and opaque transaction costs. The absence of quantitative, systematic execution tools has been a meaningful barrier to institutional confidence in the asset class.

ABEX addresses this gap with a tech stack built specifically for the architecture of digital asset markets. Its C++ ultra-low-latency trading engine enables execution at tick-to-order latency competitive with the fastest traditional market participants. The platform's machine learning algorithms optimise order execution in real time across fragmented liquidity venues, while its proprietary Transaction Cost Analysis tools provide the transparency institutions need to demonstrate best execution to their own compliance and risk functions. The system is accessible via both API and GUI, enabling integration directly into client trading flows with minimal friction, and is designed to work without requiring additional KYC/AML processes for partner institutions.

ABEX serves a growing roster of institutional clients including hedge funds, asset managers, quantitative funds, OTC desks, and prime brokers, and is targeting expansion into the EU and APAC regions. The company is registered with the UK Financial Conduct Authority, providing the regulatory baseline that institutional counterparties require. Its client base includes firms operating across global markets in the UK, EU, MENA, and APAC regions. MMC has separately backed Copper, a digital asset custody and settlement platform for institutions, and Haruko, a unified portfolio management system across centralised and decentralised finance platforms, giving ABEX access to a complementary network of institutional digital asset infrastructure providers.

MMC General Partner Oliver Richards described the firm's thesis on ABEX as a direct extension of years of tracking the institutional adoption of digital assets, noting that as markets mature the need for advanced algorithmic execution has never been greater. The combination of Kaya's track record building similar systems inside top-tier banks and ABEX's purpose-built technology stack represents, in MMC's view, the right team and product at the right inflection point in the digital asset market's maturation.

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