Dennis Dariotis, 22, founder and CEO of crypto-focused trading software company GoQuant, remembers the constraints and pressure to maximize his trading portfolio when he was still in his third year of school.
“I remember telling my teachers that I had to take 10 minutes off class to check my portfolio at the opening and closing of the market,” Dariotis said in an interview.
The young trading genius remembered that his teacher wanted to see the computer screen and what he was trading. But he said, “No, unfortunately it’s private” and closed the laptop. This was an interesting precursor to the crypto-focused dark pool app that Dariotis released last month.
Dariotis grew up in Montreal, where his first memory of the trading world was being drawn to the flashing green and red symbols on the CNBC morning show his parents broadcast in the background. It was only a matter of time before people made the connection between the ticker on their TV screen and the money in their piggy bank.
Since my student days, when I boldly followed Warren Buffett’s investment theories, the next logical step was to take up computer programming. “When I was 11 or 12 years old, I became interested in computer programming, starting with basic web development languages and evolving into Python and C++,” he recalls.
Listening to Daliotis, his evolution toward building trade infrastructure seems like the most natural thing in the world. By the age of 13, he realized that scanning large datasets was taking too much time. Is there a way to use his computing know-how to automate that process? That way, he can spend more time researching trading strategies and capturing alpha.
Dariotis, who had no prior knowledge of quantitative trading, began backtesting strategies, researching various elements of portfolio construction, optimization, and risk management, and “really getting into the weeds of all the elements of how quantitative markets work.”
It didn’t take long for a breakthrough to occur. At the ripe age of 15, Dariotis says he essentially licensed his strategy and began consulting for his first major client, a large Canadian bank. This was followed by several other investment managers. Then, at a trading and data science conference in New York, a major hedge fund tried to hire Dariotis on the spot.
“But then they were like, ‘Wait a minute, how old are you?'” And I said, ‘I’m 15,’ and they were kind of surprised. ”
It was also around this time that Dariotis started paying attention to cryptocurrencies. The first thing we noticed was how retail-oriented the crypto market was and lacked real institutional-level infrastructure. Cryptocurrencies have suffered severely from the spread of fragmented liquidity across many venues, including centralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges, and OTC desks.
Applying the Data Markets toolset to cryptocurrencies, Dariotis noticed delays when trading venues updated their order books. He realized that building the entire infrastructure stack was the best way to go.
By January 2025, GoQuant had secured a $3 million pre-seed round, as well as a $4 million seed round led by crypto trading firm GSR. It currently processes more than $1 billion in daily trading volume and employs approximately 80 staff spread across the United States, Europe, India, the Philippines, and Morocco.
Recent additions to the brand include the GoDark institutional-grade dark pool and the GoCredit lending platform, with approximately $500 million in cryptocurrency loans planned.
“We really want to be at the center of how value moves,” Dariotis said. “So we are primarily a technology provider rather than a financial intermediary at a point where everything is essentially becoming a market: prediction markets, ‘permissioning’ of all types of assets, tokenization of all types of assets, etc. We are primarily a technology provider rather than a financial intermediary. Everything is becoming tradable, so we need a core platform that connects everything and does it in a performant way.”
So what is Dariotis’ advice to other kids who are busily building multibillion-dollar companies in their bedrooms?
“You have to be flexible and willing to adapt and potentially pivot,” he said. “We started out just processing data, but you could probably do better if you just stayed in the small data world. Even if it could be a $100 million business in and of itself, you don’t want to have a product silo when its value could be multiplied many times over by building an entire connected ecosystem.”
