Kx Systems

Last updated
KX Systems Inc.
Kx Systems
Company type Private
Industry Software & Tech Services
Founded1993;31 years ago (1993) in Palo Alto, California
Founders
Headquarters,
United States
Number of locations
14 offices [1]  (2018)
Area served
Key people
Products
Parent FD Technologies plc
Website kx.com

KX is a privately owned software company that sells a time series database kdb+, used for financial modeling and data analysis, and its associated proprietary programming language q. [6] [7]

Contents

It was founded in 1993 by Janet Lustgarten and Arthur Whitney, [8] the developer of the K programming language. In 2014, First Derivatives increased their ownership interest to 65 percent; in 2018, the company (now FD Technologies plc) announced plans to buy out the remaining shares of KX. [9] KX has offices in New York City, London, England, Ireland, Germany, Australia, Singapore, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. [1] [10]

Overview

In 1993, Whitney and Lustgarten joined to commercialize the k programming platform Whitney had created after building the A+ language and other trading systems at Morgan Stanley. [7] [11] The purpose of the software was to access and explore large data volumes in financial services computer systems. [12] Initially, Kx Systems had an exclusive contract with Swiss global financial services firm UBS to provide them with the K language. In 1998, the contract with UBS expired and the firm launched the kdb+ database. As part of kdb+, Whitney developed a new language named q that operated with k and uses English keywords. [13]

In 1999, the company reached a marketing agreement with a Northern Ireland based firm, First Derivatives.; [14] it opened an office in Manhattan in 2002, [15] Germany and Japan in 2003, [16] and Hong Kong in 2009. [17] In 2014, First Derivatives purchased a 65 percent share of Kx Systems. [18] Kx became a technology supplier to NASA's Frontier Development Lab. [19] In July 2018, FD Technologies bought all remaining shares in KX Systems that it did not already hold; [20] Whitney and Lustgarten then went on to found Shakti. [21] [22]

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References

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