This Founder Duo Raised $82 Million To Build A Tech Company That Designs And Operates Smart Markets Using Algorithms To Enable Trade

Childhood friendships rarely turn into billion-dollar ideas. However, for Kelly Littlepage and Stephen Johnson, a shared curiosity in technology formed during their teenage years in suburban Colorado eventually became the foundation for building OneChronos.

A trailblazing capital markets platform, OneChronos raised over $80M and is quietly reengineering how the world trades. This story is about long-haul vision, deep technical expertise, and the perseverance that startups in hard tech spaces demand.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

A Friendship Forged in Curiosity

Kelly and Stephen first crossed paths in middle school when they were 12 or 13. They grew up in the sleepy town of Centennial, south of Denver.

With few distractions beyond a local McDonald’s and some outdated Packard Bell computers, the duo turned their attention to tinkering with hardware and writing software before computer science classes were mainstream.

“There wasn’t a lot of structured material back then,” Steve recalls. “It was the Wild West of the internet.” Both recall getting into a fair amount of experimentation that fed their fascination with systems and how things work.

Kelly, fascinated by how machines operated, from swimming pool pumps to aquariums, found computers to be the ultimate system to decode. In the early years of the Internet era, when there weren’t many resources, he remembers taking apart the hardware to figure out how it worked.

That mutual obsession with figuring things out laid the groundwork for OneChronos.

Parallel Paths: Consulting, Hedge Funds, and a Meeting of Minds

After high school, the two went their separate ways. Stephen earned a degree in computer science and economics at Lehigh University and joined Accenture, where he explored multiple industries and honed his skills in cybersecurity and software engineering.

For a time, Steve worked in consulting while he explored options for his future career path and the industry in which he wanted to work after college. The upside of this move was that he gained experience in several different industries.

Steve noted that the same problems were being replicated across huge companies, regardless of their sector. Eventually, he shifted to an R&D group, where he had the opportunity to build some new technologies and services from scratch.

During his stint with R&D, Steve developed big data, signal processing, and analytics platforms to detect signals that hackers were breaking in. This was his early brush with the kind of signal optimization OneChronos would later pursue.

Meanwhile, Kelly was doing similar things and trying to find signals to trade better. He attended Caltech, beginning as a physics major before gravitating toward applied math and auction theory.

Eventually, Kelly went on to work at a hedge fund while completing further education at Georgia Tech. He was captivated by how auction mechanics could be designed like software systems to drive better economic outcomes.

“Designing auctions that align with agent incentives felt like designing code for markets,” Kelly said. “That connection fascinated me.”

At that time, auction theory and the notion of designing auctions just as you design computer systems were not topics that attracted much interest. When Kelly graduated from school, there weren’t a lot of opportunities to do pure math outside of academia,

He was interested in finance and familiar with the D. E. Shaw story. He remembers gravitating toward trying to have some impact commercially and then taking that back to academia later.

The Spark: Combinatorial Auctions and a Timing Opportunity

The OneChronos origin story doesn’t start with a lightbulb moment but with a shared, slow-burning insight. The duo saw promise in combinatorial auctions, a market design approach that allows buyers to place complex, conditional bids across multiple assets.

Though proven in fields like display advertising and wireless spectrum licensing, the approach was considered computationally impossible for capital markets. Resolving the optimization issue was highly challenging and demanding.

When Kelly and Stephen were studying them, there wasn’t really a technical path to executing them at the speed and scale of capital markets. That is, until AlphaGo and AlphaZero demonstrated that machine learning could solve once-intractable problems.

Kelly and Stephen recognized this as a pivotal shift by staying close to the academic world. “We realized this type of auction could now be run in real-time financial markets,” Kelly noted. “That changed everything.”

Go Time: Whiteboards, Risk, and the First Week

At this point, Stephen and Kelly were both looking for their next career option. They talked on the phone, discussing the idea they had been working on.

Stephen flew out to Chicago, where Kelly was based, and the two spent an intense week on whiteboards, sketching out design, market fit, go-to-market strategy, and feasibility. That week ended with a simple conclusion: “Let’s go for it.”

The next challenge was immediate—how to integrate a novel market structure into an entrenched, fragmented ecosystem. Their approach required two strategies: win on product quality and eliminate as much friction as possible.

No one was conducting combinatorial auctions like they did outside of OneChronos. The former meant rethinking how institutional traders interacted with markets, while the latter meant solving integration hurdles that would typically discourage early adoption.

Stephen and Kelly needed to attract customers and day one participants from a very fragmented market with many choices. They were new in the arena and didn’t have the same liquidity or buyers and sellers that others had. There was no reason for people to want to plug them in at all.

Clients had several opportunity costs. When doing something novel, they could win on the product side, but also lower the friction as much as possible. Stephen and Kelly focused on both–a significant technical problem. They also had to figure out how to fund it and build it.

The Y Combinator Rejection That Led to Reinvention

Despite their conviction, early investors didn’t get it. Their first Y Combinator application was bold. “We need five years and $10M to launch,” Kelly and Stephen stated. The result? Rejection.

After six months of figuring out how to execute their idea, they realized they would have to build a stock exchange to make it work. Technically, they were an ATS, which is like an exchange, but they had to be built all at once, which is expensive.

Kelly and Stephen saw that they had a hard tech problem, which was capital and time-intensive. Essentially, it was a foreign concept for Y Combinator and investors in general.

However, partner Jared Friedman saw potential and offered feedback: show signs of life without the massive upfront spend. That advice proved pivotal. They redesigned a leaner version of their plan, reapplied, and got in.

Y Combinator didn’t just help with funding, it also sharpened their go-to-market strategy and taught them how to align their moonshot idea with investor expectations.

Kelly reveals that, unlike typical SaaS startups, they did not have a built-in customer base from Demo Day. Instead, they had a compelling market thesis, a complex technical solution, and the grit to execute. They now had to create a regulated market.

Building the Infrastructure for a Smarter Market

Launching OneChronos wasn’t just about writing code, it required building a fully regulated trading venue. The startup budget required learning a lot of the specifics and doing much of that application work in-house to control costs.

Steve became an expert in FINRA regulations, broker-dealer requirements, and the complexities of NMS compliance, tasks that are far removed from your average startup playbook.

They officially launched OneChronos as an Alternative Trading System (ATS) for U.S. equities. It was essentially a stock exchange without listings, matching securities for institutional buyers and sellers.

But the real innovation lies in their use of combinatorial auctions, which allow institutional investors to optimize entire portfolios, not just individual trades. Earlier, that was computationally impossible, but now there’s a path forward.

Kelly and Stephen started with US equities since it was one way of demonstrating potential.

Kelly explains: “The value is in freeing investors from having to think about the complexities of fragmented market structures. They can focus on portfolio construction and their investment process. We abstract away the friction.”

Fundraising: Finding the Right Kind of Capital

Over time, Kelly and Stephen raised more than $82M, but not from just any investors. OneChronos is a capital markets company and venture capital is also a form of capital markets. Although they seem similar, OneChronos is deeply involved in the trading infrastructure of the world.

There aren’t many companies working in this space. “This isn’t a space that most VCs understand,” Stephen admitted. “We needed high-conviction, some experience in the field, and patient capital.”

Their lead backers, Green Visor Capital and Addition, were aligned on both time horizon and ambition. It took years between seed and Series A, and even longer to go live. But the vision was always long-term.

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The Vision: A Bazaar for the Algorithmic Economy

OneChronos may have started with U.S. equities, but their sights are set much higher. They envision a future where autonomous agents conduct complex transactions across industries, such as freight, energy, commodities, but without human bottlenecks.

“Whether it’s trucking routes from Chicago to New York or liquid natural gas (LNG) shipments, we see a world where algorithmic agents drive efficiency,” Stephen said. “And we’ve built OneChronos to be the platform where those agents do business.”

At present, all kinds of transactions are very manual with most happening through brokers or a voice trading process. The OneChronos thesis is for these transactions to be done or facilitated by algorithmic agents in the future.

Explaining how equities work, Stephen says that large institutions wanting to trade a large portfolio or a large percentage of a company, outsource the job to a series of algorithms.

The human in the loop makes sure the algorithms are performing as expected by measuring their performance as they execute trades in the market. Stephen anticipates that many other markets will adapt this strategy where humans enabled by algorithms can do more than they do today.

That’s the whole idea behind smart markets, which will soon proliferate throughout all kinds of physical economy markets. OneChronos will be at the forefront of them. To get there, Kelly and Stephen have shifted from an early-stage to a more growth-stage mentality.

Kelly calls it the “bazaar for the AI of the future, where these autonomous agents are going to do business with each other.” It is like finding the right balance between focusing on the immediate growth story, which is capital markets, and within capital markets, mainly US equities.

At the same time, they are focused on staying true to their vision. They anticipate a new market emerging.

Shifting Gears: From Engineering to Operations

The focus shifted as OneChronos moved from R&D to a live trading venue. Now it’s about running markets with 100% uptime, rolling out new products, and scaling without sacrificing integrity.

As Kelly explains, there’s definitely the operational aspect of just going live from before it launched. It was really largely a pure engineering company focused on just building new technology. Now that it is operational, they are constantly trying to iterate, improve existing products, and launch new products

Final Reflections: On Perseverance and Perspective

Asked for advice to other founders, both founders echoed the need for resilience. Stephen says, “Perseverance. It’s been a decade-long grind with plenty of moments when we could’ve given up.”

But their persistence paid off when their customers validated their ideas. The duo received feedback that what they are doing is very innovative and exactly what the market needs.

Kelly opines, “Don’t over-celebrate the wins or dwell on the losses. The truth is always somewhere in between. Stay level, whether that’s an investor or potential customer conversation that didn’t go the way you thought it would.”

The Bottom Line

OneChronos isn’t just a trading venue; it’s a deep tech company reimagining how markets work in an increasingly algorithmic world. Built on childhood friendship, academic rigor, and startup hustle, Kelly and Stephen’s story proves that radical ideas can thrive even in the most complex corners of finance.

All they needed was to combine vision with patience and a relentless drive to solve complex problems.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• Kelly Littlepage and Stephen Johnson turned a childhood friendship into OneChronos, a cutting-edge trading platform using combinatorial auctions.
• Their startup journey began with a bold idea: bring computationally complex auction theory into real-time capital markets.
• Early rejection from Y Combinator led to a more strategic, staged approach that ultimately won them entry and shaped their go-to-market thinking.
• Launching OneChronos required not just innovation, but mastering complex financial regulations to build a compliant trading venue from scratch.
• They raised over $80M by finding long-term, high-conviction investors who understood the depth and time horizon of their vision.
• OneChronos sees itself as the foundation for future markets in which algorithmic agents, not humans, drive global transactions.
• Their advice to founders: perseverance and emotional stability are essential in building deep tech companies that take a decade to realize.

 

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