Tower Research hired a Millennium veteran for its MFT platform after the hedge fund hired its CTO. 5 minutes ago Building a platform for not-so-lightning fast trades Earlier this year, Millennium hired Alexandre Fournier, CTO of high-frequency trading firm Tower Research, to work on low-latency technology. Turnabout is fair play, it seems, as Tower has now hired a veteran technologist of the hedge fund to aid its push into mid-frequency trading (MFT) strategies. Marvin Arteaga has joined Tower Research as its head of MFT strategies, based in New York. He was at Millennium for 12 years, predominantly serving as head of algo execution technologies. He spent seven years before that working in algo development at Bank of America. Curiously, Arteaga worked remotely in his last year at Millennium in the seemingly less senior role of 'liquidity provision technology manager.' His new role with Tower is hybrid. MFT strategies involve holding positions for minutes to days, as opposed to HFT strategies where positions can be held for microseconds or less. Tower has been building out its MFT capabilities for years, much like other major players including Jane Street and Hudson River Trading. Iain Dunning, head of AI at Hudson River Trading, famously said last year that "all the latency has been arbitraged for the most part." MFT strategies are more likely to involve machine learning, which the major firms have been investing billions into as they build out their compute stacks. It's not just technologists moving between Tower and Millennium. Wesley Chen, Tower's co-head of investment grade credit trading, joined Millennium as a portfolio manager in June. Millennium declined to comment. Tower did not respond to a comment request. Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you'd like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, WhatsApp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Signal: sarahbutcher.22 Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email [email protected]. Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate. The essential daily roundup of news and analysis read by everyone from senior bankers and traders to new recruits. Boost your career. Find thousands of job opportunities by signing up to eFinancialCareers today. Top Articles

Asymptote Labs raises $5.5M to track and control what AI agents do. Its free Beacon tool logs activity from Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and more than 20 other agent tools. October 20, 2026 - 4:17 pm New York startup Asymptote Labs has raised a $5.5M seed round led by Tower Research Ventures. It makes Beacon, a free open-source tool that records what AI agents do, and sells a paid platform that can block risky agent actions. The money will go on engineering, hiring and sales. Asymptote Labs, a New York startup that monitors what AI agents do inside companies, has raised $5.5M in seed funding, it said on Tuesday. Tower Research Ventures, the venture arm of trading firm Tower Research Capital, led the round. Lytical Ventures, 1984 Ventures and South Park Commons also took part. The company did not disclose its valuation. Asymptote's main product is Beacon, a free, open-source tool that records what AI agents do. It works with coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex and Cursor, and more than 20 others. It puts their activity, including prompts, commands and file edits, into one standard format. That gives security teams one place to see what different agents did, and on whose behalf. Asymptote's paid platform builds on Beacon and can block risky actions, such as data leaks, before they happen, the company said. "AI agents are becoming a new operating layer inside every company, but the infrastructure to understand and control them hasn't caught up," said Justin D'Souza, Asymptote's co-founder and chief executive. D'Souza and co-founder Shukan Shah previously worked as engineers at Doppel, a startup that fights social engineering attacks. Beacon launched in May, and the company says its GitHub page grew its stars by more than 460% in September. Asymptote said security teams already use its tools in production, but did not name customers. Tower's own security team is testing Beacon on its computers, the company said. Investors are betting that companies need new tools as agents take on real work. Straiker raised $64M in June to test and monitor AI agents. This month, researchers said a single prompt let them take over agents on Amazon's AgentCore, though AWS disputed the findings. Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.