Clear Street

Clear Street is a New York-headquartered financial infrastructure and brokerage technology firm that operates a single, cloud-native, API-based capital markets platform spanning clearing, settlement, custody, financing, execution and trading, investment banking, and prime brokerage. The company began with a prime brokerage platform for institutional investors and has extended the same underlying infrastructure to serve fintechs, market makers, professional and active traders, hedge funds, family offices, broker-dealers, ETF issuers, corporate issuers, and traditional and alternative asset managers. Products include institutional services, professional clearing for market-making and futures clearing participants, active trader services, and Clear Street Studio, a portfolio management system covering trading, risk and margin, exposures, P&L and analytic reporting.

Its consumer-facing trading proposition provides access to US equities and ETFs (long and short), locates, international markets and three levels of options trading, with futures, prediction markets and fixed income described as forthcoming. Access is available via web, mobile, a REST trading API with Python, JavaScript and Go SDKs, TradingView, and a Model Context Protocol server that connects the platform to AI assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok. An "Omni AI" component is positioned for market research, explaining market mechanics and order types, and translating natural-language prompts into multi-leg, multi-name and allocation-based order tickets for review.

Regulated entities include Clear Street LLC, a broker-dealer that is a member of FINRA and SIPC and a Futures Commission Merchant registered with the CFTC and a member of NFA, and Clear Street UK Limited, authorised and regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority and a Category 1 member of the London Metals Exchange. The platform connects to clearing venues and exchanges across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific, with a number of additional venues in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific listed as coming soon.

Founding story

Clear Street was launched in 2018 to replace the outdated technology infrastructure used across capital markets. Co-founder and CEO Chris Pento said the firm was founded because it should not take six months to open an account or a year to begin trading a new asset class, while co-founder and CTO Sachin Kumar said the team started with prime brokerage because they had experienced first-hand the frustrations of operating on legacy technology, then realised most of that infrastructure is shared with other market participants. Pento has said the timing was pivotal: his prior Wall Street experience combined with the availability of open-source tooling and cloud-native infrastructure made the problem addressable.

Business model

Clear Street sells brokerage and market-infrastructure services — clearing, settlement and custody, financing, execution and trading, investment banking, and portfolio/risk management software — to institutions and to sophisticated individual traders, delivered through its own cloud-native platform and accessed via web, mobile, API and MCP interfaces. Because roughly 80–90% of the infrastructure used to service prime brokerage clients is shared with other market participants, the company reuses a common API-first platform to add client personas, asset classes and geographies.

Revenue derives from brokerage and market infrastructure activity — clearing, financing, execution and related institutional services, plus investment banking — charged to institutional and active-trader clients; the retail-facing site advertises real-time professional execution with no hidden fees and a published pricing page.

Traction

As of Q1 2026 the company reported 950 total institutional clients, average daily trading volume of 621 million shares, $33.6 billion notional per day in US equities, and more than 900 employees worldwide. Earlier figures on its institutional site cite 800+ employees, roughly 550 million shares and $28.4 billion notional per day, 94% year-over-year transacted growth, about $16 billion in customer balances, roughly 700 institutional clients and $1.0 billion in capital raised. At the time of the 2022 Series B it processed more than $3 billion in daily trading volume, with financing balances up 220% and equity transactional volume up 510% since the start of 2021.

Latest developments

In February 2026 Clear Street announced it had entered into an agreement on 30 January 2026 to acquire BOOM Securities (H.K.) Limited, Hong Kong's first licensed online brokerage, founded in 1997 with more than $2 billion in assets under management and thousands of active clients expected to migrate to Clear Street's platform; the deal is subject to Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission approval and customary closing conditions and was expected to close in mid-2026. Concurrently, John Deters, previously EVP and Chief Strategy Officer at Cboe Global Markets, joined as Chief Strategy and Growth Officer, and the company withdrew its Form S-1, citing market conditions, with plans to relaunch an IPO later. Other recent developments reported include the addition of 24-hour, 6-day equities trading, OCC cross-margin capabilities, FCA approval for UK operations, and an Omni AI offering plus MCP-based AI assistant integration on its trading platform.