Today we’re announcing our $6.1M Series A, led by LeveL Markets, with participation from Draper Associates, Canapi Ventures, and Clocktower Ventures. Here’s why we started OpenYield, what we’ve built, and where we’re going.
Where this started
I started my career quoting emerging markets bonds at Morgan Stanley. Prices came from human traders, sent to curated client lists, and who you knew determined the price you got. My favorite part of the job was automating quotation: building spreadsheets and macros so a machine could do what the humans did.
Later I ran fixed income execution at Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund. Everything was systematic: what to trade, when, at what level. Everything except execution itself. Liquidity came from human traders over chat and RFQ, so our systematic process ended with people procedurally clicking and typing. Equities had a rich ecosystem of execution algorithms. We had humans.
After Bridgewater I helped build two retail brokerage businesses, SoFi and Domain Money. New entrant platforms were racing to add asset classes to compete with incumbents, and that race would inevitably reach fixed income. The demand for better bond infrastructure wasn’t theoretical, it was coming.
In the fall of 2022, I logged into my retail brokerage to look at bond prices and was transported to an experience designed twenty years ago. One tab over, I could trade stocks instantly, with no commissions, at a transparent price. I knew algorithmic liquidity was rising across institutional desks, but the experience hadn’t changed, and I realized why: the plumbing of the fixed income market was built decades back, before algos existed, and nobody had rebuilt it. So I started building.
The market is moving
The supply side of the market is in flux. Banks that dominated bond trading on the strength of their long-standing franchises are losing ground to quantitative new entrants. A nonbank competing economically with the largest bank trading desks would have been hard to imagine a decade ago. Firms like Jane Street have made that shift impossible to ignore.
What’s going on? The rise of electronic markets opens doors to entrants whose edge comes from technology, data, and speed, not legacy franchises. The old guard relied on client calls to generate revenue. The new guard trades electronically on venues. Clients get better prices, more flow moves electronic, and the loop compounds. Spread compression follows. Corporate credit has moved further down this path. Municipals are earlier, but the same forces are arriving. Dealers everywhere are now investing in their own algos to compete.
But the existing infrastructure in the fixed income market pre-dates the automation of dealers, and was structured around clients interacting with dealers by request. The concept of last-look pervades electronic matching, meaning that prices shown are technically indications, and clients must request to trade, with dealers deciding to honor, or not. This protocol made sense when humans needed to confirm everything, but is a vestigial appendage in a world where algos are running the show.
What we built
OpenYield is a marketplace built for a world of automated execution. Firm orders, all-to-all trading, and API-first delivery for flexible integration into execution systems, not another window competing for a human trader’s attention. That design runs through the entire platform and operating model: better, faster, cheaper delivery that enables programmatic outcomes.
It’s working. Since launching in 2024 we’ve traded nearly $2B across 85k tickets, and count 60+ institutional subscribers and a growing network of EMS integrations bringing the marketplace directly into client workflows. And we’re now expanding our reach through an integration with LeveL Markets, our lead investor. We’ve also launched our data business, commercializing the API infrastructure behind our ATS: price histories and analytics that power client workflows beyond execution.
What’s next
There’s a growing energy in our industry. AI is diffusing across trading desks, and the buyside is systematizing how it touches fixed income liquidity, especially in SMAs. Every step of that progression runs best on prices that are firm, transparent, and actionable by a machine, which is exactly what OpenYield delivers.
And there’s more coming: more ways to connect, beyond FIX to soon include a REST API and an MCP server designed for emerging agent-based trading workflows; more ways to trade, including RFO (RFQ-style trading overlaid onto our order book) and new order types built for automation; tokenization to further reduce the unit cost of trading; and expansion into more asset classes and geographies beyond the U.S.
A more efficient bond market means broader participation from retail investors and advisors, and more flexibility for asset managers to build better products. Our mission is simple: connect the buyers and sellers of bonds. The work is complex: a highly regulated market, thousands of institutions, entrenched workflows, and layers of intermediation.
That is why we are building OpenYield as market infrastructure: trading and data designed to work as one system. The opportunity is to modernize how a $150T market trades, and to deliver better outcomes to investors everywhere.
Thank you to our clients, our team, and our investors. If you trade bonds and want to scale your automation, talk to us. And if you are excited by this mission, we’re hiring.