The 2016 Tech 50: Jock Percy

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Jock Percy
Chief Executive Officer
Perseus
Last year: 50

A $20.5 million Goldman Sachs Group investment last year brought more than monetary value to New York–based Perseus: The stake enhanced the Wall Street cred of a fast-growing, then-six-year-old venture selling high-performance communication and connectivity services to the most-demanding traders, exchanges and other financial market participants. And with the capital Perseus accelerated expansion of what it describes as the world’s largest software-defined network, reaching more than 70 markets on six continents. Since completing a Mumbai-London link in January, “we now circumnavigate the globe,” says founder and CEO Jock Percy. Nearly all of the 20 biggest banks are Perseus customers, and revenue is growing 30 to 40 percent annually, the 42-year-old New Zealand native and rugby enthusiast reports. Financial services firms account for nearly 80 percent of the business, with the rest coming from e-commerce, gaming and media. In May, Perseus announced a deal to deliver over its LiquidPath infrastructure the Nasdaq TotalView real-time data feed, as well as access to U.S. equity and Treasury markets, the last through the Nasdaq-affiliated eSpeed ITCH platform. Positioning Perseus to play a fintech-supporting role, Percy sees the managed-services architecture ensuring efficient processing of payments from apps and mobile devices. “We know stocks trade in milliseconds,” he says. “For a consumer with, say, an Apple device, the payment has to be under 30 seconds for a satisfactory user experience.” He believes that digital currencies and blockchain could get a similar boost with Perseus’ “Wall Street–grade” offering; trades processed by capital markets blockchain developer Noble Markets, a Perseus customer, represent “a great use case for us.” Noting that “latency jitter” is inherent in the public Internet, he adds, “If you can make applications faster and transaction times orders of magnitude faster, then everybody wins.”

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The 2016 Tech 50