Optiver

Optiver is a global market maker founded in Amsterdam in 1986. It uses its own capital to continuously quote buying and selling prices, providing liquidity so financial-market participants can trade in both stable and volatile conditions. The firm trades listed derivatives, equities, exchange-traded funds, bonds and foreign currencies. Its sales and trading teams also provide tailored liquidity services to banks, brokers and institutional clients.

Optiver combines quantitative research with trading infrastructure: statistical modelling and machine learning identify patterns in market data and inform asset pricing, while engineers build the systems that turn those models into live trades. Its technology platform includes low-latency C++ systems, custom field-programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware and infrastructure for large-scale research and machine-learning workflows. Engineers work alongside traders and researchers to refine models, execution and risk controls. Optiver reports operating across 100-plus exchanges, pricing more than one million financial instruments and executing more than 10 million trades daily.

Lance Braunstein became global chief technology officer in May 2025. One example of Optiver’s internal AI engineering work is an experimental agent-driven development workflow for connecting to new exchanges. The project focuses on session-management software, which handles logins, heartbeats and communication with the trading stack. Agents receive context relevant to each development phase, including exchange behaviour captured from real traffic. Automated tests and verification gates check their work, with end-to-end scenarios running in a non-production environment rather than relying on an agent’s own claim of success. Humans retain architectural review and risk decisions; the experiment is not a commercial product or evidence of company-wide deployment.

Beyond its own trading operations, Optiver makes strategic investments in companies where it can contribute trading, technology and market expertise. On August 18, 2026, it announced an agreement to acquire a majority stake in Northpool, a European power and gas trading firm headquartered in Leiden, the Netherlands.