Axoni

Overview

Axoni — legally Schvey, Inc., doing business as Axoni — is a New York-based capital-markets technology firm that builds distributed-ledger infrastructure for financial institutions (Financial Adviser Magazine). Founded in 2013 by a team of distributed-ledger entrepreneurs and cryptography specialists and led by CEO Greg Schvey, it developed blockchain software for post-trade data management across credit-default swaps, equity swaps and foreign-exchange derivatives in partnership with more than a dozen global banks (Financial Adviser Magazine). Its flagship product, the Veris network, became one of the few production-grade institutional blockchain networks in finance — and in 2024 the business was acquired by the London Stock Exchange Group (The TRADE).

From pilot to production: the equity-swaps network

Axoni’s defining project was the application of distributed ledgers to one of finance’s most operationally painful problems: reconciling equity swaps. In October 2016 the company organized a working group of Citi, Credit Suisse and J.P. Morgan to test blockchain-based post-trade processing of equity swaps (The TRADE), followed by a months-long pilot with the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Citi and Credit Suisse of a peer-to-peer blockchain infrastructure using smart contracts (Investment Executive). The goal, as Citi’s head of prime finance put it, was fewer valuation disputes, less reconciliation and real-time data access (Investment Executive).

In 2020 Axoni turned the pilot into a live network: Veris, a distributed-ledger platform for post-trade lifecycle management and reconciliation of equity swaps (The TRADE). Veris lets counterparties share and compare data on swap deals, positions, trades and related cash flows, streamlining reconciliation and preventing cash-flow breaks (The TRADE). Its breakthrough moment came in September 2021, when BlackRock — the world’s largest money manager — joined Veris alongside Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, integrating Axoni’s software with its Aladdin operating system to match and reconcile post-trade data on stock swaps (Bloomberg). The market it served was substantial: Bank for International Settlements data put the global equity-linked forwards and swaps market at about $3.6 trillion (Bloomberg).

A bank-backed cap table

Unusually for a startup, Axoni’s investors were largely its prospective customers. The December 2016 Series A raised $18 million led by Wells Fargo and ICAP’s fintech investment arm Euclid Opportunities, with Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Thomson Reuters, Andreessen Horowitz, FinTech Collective, F-Prime and Digital Currency Group participating, taking total funding above $20 million (Financial Adviser Magazine). In November 2018 HSBC joined the Series B, bringing that round to $36 million and total funding to $59 million, with the money earmarked for AxCore — Axoni’s data-synchronization platform — and AxLang, an Ethereum-compatible smart-contract language designed for formal verification (Finadium). By then Axoni’s investor roster spanned the industry’s biggest names — Goldman Sachs, Nyca Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Citi, Coatue Management, Digital Currency Group, F-Prime Capital, Franklin Templeton Investments, J.P. Morgan, NEX Group, Wells Fargo and Y Combinator — effectively turning its customer base into its cap table (Finadium). HSBC’s global-banking COO said at the time that distributed-ledger technology would “clearly be important in modernizing the shared infrastructure of capital markets” and that Axoni had “demonstrated that they are the leader in this space” (Finadium).

The LSEG acquisition

In September 2024 the London Stock Exchange Group moved to acquire Axoni’s post-trade technology, including the Veris network, with the transaction expected to complete in the fourth quarter; after a transition period LSEG would own and operate Veris (The TRADE). The deal followed LSEG’s 2022 acquisition of Acadia and its Quantile approval as part of a deliberate build-out of multi-asset post-trade capabilities (The TRADE). Axoni’s CEO Greg Schvey framed it as a step toward modernizing over-the-counter derivatives post-trade infrastructure (The TRADE). The outcome is a rare one in enterprise blockchain: a bank-built ledger network now operated by a stock-exchange group.

What this profile does not claim

• It does not state the financial terms of the LSEG acquisition; they were not disclosed in any fully-read source.
• It does not state whether the acquisition closed in Q4 2024 as announced; no fully-read follow-up confirming closure was found.
• It does not describe Axoni’s product portfolio after the sale; the status of AxCore and Axoni’s other software was not verified from fully-read sources.
• It does not state an all-time funding total; published figures conflict ($59 million at the 2018 Series B versus higher cumulative directory totals).
• It does not repeat Axoni’s own marketing claims about its technology; capabilities described above are limited to what independent sources reported.