Denis Dariotis, 22, founder and CEO of cryptocurrency-focused trading software company GoQuant, remembers the constraints and pressures of maximizing his trading portfolio while he was still in his third year at school.
“I remember telling my professors that I had to take 10 minutes outside of class to check my portfolio when the market opened and closed,” Dariotis said in an interview.
The trading prodigy recalled how a teacher wanted to see his computer screen and what he was trading. But he closed the laptop and said, “No, I’m afraid it’s private” – an interesting foreshadowing of the crypto-focused dark pool app Dariotis, released last month.
Dariotis grew up in Montreal, where his first memory of the world of commerce was drawn to the flashing green and red symbols on the CNBC morning show his parents had on 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 days in school, boldly following Warren Buffet’s investment thesis, the next logical step was to pursue computer programming. “Around age 11 or 12, I became interested in computer programming, starting with basic web development languages and then moving into Python and C++,” he recalls.
The way Dariotis tells it, his move toward building business infrastructure seems like the most natural thing in the world. At the age of 13, he realized that he was spending too much time analyzing a ton of data sets and wasn’t there a way to use his computer skills to automate this process? This way, he could spend more time researching trading strategies and obtaining alpha.
Having previously had no knowledge of quantitative trading, Dariotis began testing strategies and researching different elements of portfolio construction, optimization, risk management, and “really diving into the details of every element of how quantitative markets work.”
It didn’t take long for a breakthrough to occur: At the age of 15, Dariotis says he essentially 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 trading and data science conference in New York, a large hedge fund tried to hire Dariotis on the spot.
“But then they were like, ‘Wait a second, how old are you?’ And then I was like, “I’m 15,” and they kind of freaked out.
This was also when Dariotis first became interested in cryptography. The first realization was how retail-driven crypto markets were and lacked true institutional-level infrastructure. Crypto has seriously suffered from the fragmentation of liquidity spread across numerous sites: centralized and decentralized exchanges, OTC desks.
After applying his data market toolset to crypto, Dariotis noticed latency delays in the way trading platforms updated order books. He realized that the best way to do this was to build the entire infrastructure.
In January 2025, GoQuant won a $3 million pre-seed round, plus a $4 million seed round led by crypto trading firm GSR. It now handles more than $1 billion in trading volume every day and employs approximately 80 people across the United States, Europe, India, the Philippines and Morocco.
Recent additions to the brand include institutional-grade dark pool GoDark and a GoCredit lending platform that has around half a billion dollars in crypto loans outstanding.
“We really want to be at the center of the value evolution,” Dariotis said. “So we are largely a technology provider rather than a financial intermediary, in an age where everything is essentially becoming a market: prediction markets, the ‘perpification’ of all kinds of assets, the tokenization of all kinds of assets. Everything is becoming tradable, so there is a need to have a central platform that connects everything and does it in a powerful way.”
So what advice does Dariotis give to other kids busy building billion-dollar businesses in their bedrooms?
“You have to be flexible, willing to adapt and potentially pivot,” he said. “We started out just processing data and we could have stayed in our little world of data and probably done very well. You want to avoid creating product silos – even if they were $100 million companies on their own – when they have the potential to be worth many times more by building a whole connected ecosystem.”
