Octaura just dropped a funding round that’s less fintech and more power play. $46.5 million in an oversubscribed raise? That’s not a Series Whatever, that’s a signal flare.
Let’s rewind: Octaura Holdings didn’t crawl out of the sandbox hoping to “disrupt.” This was born fully armed, spun out of a consortium of banking titans like Bank of America and Citi, not as some polite experiment but as a full-frontal response to the inefficiencies that still choke the syndicated loan and CLO markets. Think of it as the revenge of the nerds, but this time, they brought the balance sheets.
CEO Brian Bejile, a former CLO desk heavyweight at Citi, didn’t just spot the gap, he cracked it open and built a highway through it. When you’ve run the number 1 CLO trading desk by volume for years, you don’t show up to modernize, you show up to dominate. CTO Luis Carballo and CPO Vitaliy Kozak (also ex-Citi) didn’t join for a hobby project. They’ve helped build a machine that, in one year, scaled market share from 1% to 4.6% in secondary loan trading. That’s not growth. That’s validation.
This round’s investor list reads like a who’s who of global finance: existing backers Bank of America, Citi, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, and Moody’s doubled down. And now, the new crew, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, Apollo, Motive Partners, MassMutual Ventures, and OMERS Ventures, wants in. When that many sharks circle the same vessel, it ain’t because it’s leaking, it’s because it’s moving.
Octaura’s not just replacing phone calls with keystrokes. They’re digitizing an entire corner of capital markets that’s been allergic to efficiency for decades. This is a platform built on Genesis Global’s low code backbone, piping in real-time data, price-yield tables, analytics, straight-through-processing, the works. Manual workflow? Dead. Bilateral quoting? Alive and thriving.
Now with 25 dealers and 146 buy-side firms in orbit, Octaura is no longer the new kid on the trading desk. It’s the kid flipping desks.
And they’re not stopping here. CLOs are next. Expansion to Europe is on deck. Data and analytics subscriptions are already on lock. This isn’t about digitization. It’s about orchestration. The whole platform plays like jazz, complex under the hood, smooth on the surface.
You want a business lesson? Here it is: When legacy institutions start building like startups and hire people who think like traders but code like engineers, they don’t disrupt the market, they define it.
