Celero Ventures, a London- and Jersey-based venture capital firm, has made an undisclosed strategic investment into BTON, a collaborative data and decision-assistance company.
Founded by former executives from MuleSoft and Databricks, Celero Ventures is a venture fund focused on AI, infrastructure, and enterprise software across Europe and the U.S.
Dan Shepherd, BTON CEO, said that Celero brings both capital and hands-on GTM (go to market) expertise to companies like BTON.
“They’re a very dynamic venture capital firm with deep roots in AI, data infrastructure, and enterprise software and experienced operators of global scale, coming from backgrounds at MuleSoft and Databricks,” he said.
“They definitely aren’t just capital, they’re really partners in assisting the business to scale into the US. So we’re really excited to be working with them,” he told Traders Magazine.
The funding will accelerate BTON’s U.S. expansion and support development of new AI-powered solutions that improve execution quality across the industry.
“Our solutions are already tailored to the US market. The US is the capital market to a very very large degree. So we have always kept that in mind when building BTON,” Shepherd said.
BTON delivers an API-first intelligence layer that connects trading desks to brokers by turning fragmented performance data into collaborative insights.
OEMS and TCA agnostic, BTON integrates directly into existing FIX and EMS workflows, embedding explainable AI decision support with zero disruption.
By aggregating anonymised trading data across buy-side participants, BTON enables desks to benefit from a larger collaborative dataset while safeguarding proprietary information.
This powers an AI engine that recommends the most appropriate broker algo for each order, helping firms meet execution and commission-allocation goals in real time.
Shepherd explained that BTON only aggregates the anonymised vectors of the trades after output from TCA.
“We don’t aggregate ‘raw’ trading data. This means nothing can be reversed engineered. Data security and privacy is of the upmost importance to our customer base, the system has been designed with that in mind as well as the performance benefits,” he said.
“The only insights that can be gleaned from the aggregated data are performance metrics on different order types at different brokers using different benchmarks etc,” he added.
Shepherd stressed that “the game has changed now – data is key, and people attitudes to it in finance has now shifted”.
“Motivation was always with proprietary systems in institutional trading, but we’ve seen it time and time again in other industries, whether it be trust platforms for taxis, maps, airfares, etc.,” he said.
According to Shepherd, collaborative data improves outcomes: “That’s what we’re doing here. This is machine learning, not large language models. Machine learning is judged by predictive accuracy against known outcomes.”
He added that generative AI, by contrast, is measured on how well its outputs resemble real-world data distributions or language, focusing on realism and statistical fidelity rather than single “correct” answers. “People worry about data leakage in LLMs because these models are trained on massive, often opaque datasets, making it hard to know if sensitive or proprietary information was absorbed and could later be reproduced,” he commented.
“In contrast, traditional machine learning uses well-defined datasets so there the risk of unintentionally memorising and exposing confidential data isn’t a concern here,” he added.
When asked about key metrics or milestones that will define success for BTON’s U.S. expansion over the next 12–18 months, Shepherd said that most solutions are hard to embed into existing workflows, but “BTON is an API, joining the dots from the EMS to TCA and back”.
“Due to the ease of access to BTON and benefit for the users, our success will be defined by the market using BTON as standard to route orders more effectively to brokers, reducing friction in the trade lifecycle and optimising outcomes for the end investors,” he concluded.
