Denis Dariotis, the 22-year-old founder and CEO of cryptocurrency-focused trading software company GoQuant, remembers the constraints and pressure of maximizing his trading portfolio while still in third grade at school.
“I remember telling my teachers that I had to take 10 minutes out of class to check my portfolio when the market opened and closed,” Dariotis said in an interview.
The shopping prodigy recalled how a teacher wanted to see his computer screen and what he was shopping for. But he closed the laptop and said, “No, I’m afraid it’s private” — an interesting take on the crypto-focused dark pool app Dariotis released last month.
Dariotis grew up in Montreal, where his earliest memory of the trading world was drawn to the symbols flashing green and red on the CNBC morning show his parents had in the background. It was only a matter of time before he made the connection between the tickers on the TV screen and the money in his piggy bank.
From his early school days, boldly following Warren Buffet’s investment thesis, the next logical step was to get into computer programming. “When I was about 11 or 12 years old, I became interested in computer programming, starting with basic web development languages and then progressing to Python and C++,” he recalls.
Listening to the way Dariotis tells it, his evolution toward building trade infrastructure seems the most natural thing in the world. At the age of 13, he realized that he was spending too much time scanning a ton of data sets, and wasn’t there a way to use his computer know-how to automate that process? That way he could spend more time researching trading strategies and getting alpha.
Having been ignorant of quant trading, Dariotis began back-testing strategies and researching various elements of portfolio construction, optimization, risk management and “really getting into the weeds of every element of how quant markets work.”
It wasn’t long before a breakthrough came: At the ripe old age of 15, Dariotis says, he basically licensed his strategies and began consulting for a major Canadian bank, which was his first major client. This was followed by a few other investment managers. Later, at a business and data science conference in New York, a large hedge fund tried to hire Dariotis on the spot.
“But then they said, ‘Wait a minute, how old are you?’ And then I was like, ‘I’m 15,’ and they kind of freaked out.”
This was also around the time Dariotis started looking into crypto. The first realization was how retail-oriented crypto markets are, lacking any real institutional-grade infrastructure. Crypto suffered severely from having fragmented liquidity spread across many venues: centralized and decentralized exchanges, OTC desks.
After applying his data market toolkit to crypto, Dariotis saw delays in the way trading venues updated order books. He realized that the best way to go was to build the entire infrastructure stack.
By January 2025, GoQuant had raised a $3 million pre-seed round plus a $4 million seed round led by crypto trading firm GSR. It now handles over $1 billion in trading volume every day and employs around 80 people across the US, Europe, India, the Philippines and Morocco.
Recent additions to the brand include the institutional-grade GoDark dark pool and a GoCredit lending platform, which has around half a billion dollars of crypto loans in the pipeline.
“We really want to be at the center of how value moves,” Dariotis said. “So we are very much a technology provider, rather than a financial intermediary, at a time when everything is essentially becoming a market: prediction markets, ‘perpification’ of all kinds of assets, tokenization of all kinds of assets. Everything is becoming tradable, so there is a need for a core platform that connects everything and does it in an efficient way.”
So what’s Dariotis’ advice to other kids who are busy building billion-dollar companies in their bedrooms?
“You have to be flexible, willing to adapt and potentially pivot,” he said. “We started out just handling data, and we could have just stayed in our little data world and probably done very well. You want to avoid creating product silos—even though these could be $100 million companies alone—when they have the potential to be worth more by building a whole connected ecosystem.”
