Jump Trading Hired Founders of Startup Ito
The firm acquired the team to bolster a new desk dedicated to trading computing power as an asset class.
Updated on Oct. 13, 2026 in Quantum Computing
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Jump Trading has completed an acqui-hire of Affaan Mustafa and Alejandro Soumah Fernandez, the founders of the startup Ito. This move signals the firm's entry into the emerging market for trading raw computing power.
Why it matters
Market makers are increasingly treating compute capacity as a tradable asset class similar to traditional commodities or financial instruments. This development highlights the growing industrialization of high-performance computing resources within global financial markets.
Jump Trading has launched a dedicated compute desk to facilitate the trading of computing power. The scale of the firm's underlying hardware infrastructure for this asset class has not been publicly benchmarked against standard cloud or HPC providers.
The players
Jump Trading
A high-frequency proprietary trading firm known for its focus on electronic market-making and sophisticated algorithmic infrastructure.
Affaan Mustafa
A founder of the startup Ito who has joined the team at Jump Trading to build out a new compute-focused trading desk.
Alejandro Soumah Fernandez
A founder of the startup Ito who has joined the team at Jump Trading to work on computing power as an asset class.
Ito
A startup focused on the commercialization of computing power that was absorbed into Jump Trading through an acqui-hire.
The details
The acqui-hire process involves integrating Ito's founders directly into the proprietary trading infrastructure at Jump Trading. By bringing Mustafa and Fernandez in-house, the firm aims to develop specialized systems capable of treating compute cycles—the execution of a specific processing operation by a CPU or GPU—as a liquid asset. This integration focuses on building the necessary middleware to treat physical or cloud-based server capacity as a financial product.
Timeline
The hiring of the founders was announced on October 13, 2026.
The Tech Race
The move follows the broader industry trend of treating high-performance computing infrastructure as a commoditized service. Jump Trading is now positioning itself to lead the financialization of compute capacity, effectively competing with traditional cloud infrastructure providers by offering liquidity for processing power.
The change primarily affects institutional market workflows rather than individual consumer access to computing hardware. Users in the high-performance computing space should watch for shifts in how market makers influence the pricing and availability of global compute resources.
The takeaway
The transformation of raw computing power into a tradable commodity could fundamentally alter how data centers and cloud providers manage inventory. Observers should track any future publications from the new Jump Trading compute desk regarding standardized metrics for valuation of compute cycles.
Further reading
Explore the evolving landscape of high-performance resources in our Quantum Computing section.
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