FX market maker XTX Markets has gone public with details of its venture capital arm, aptly called XTX Ventures.

XTX Markets surprised the FX sector with its latest financial report for 2019, first reported exclusively here at FNG, mainly with regards to how much money it makes. In 2019 XTX brought in $447 million in Revenue resulting in Net Profit of $183 million, all from low margin, high volume market making.

And it seems like XTX is planning on plowing some of those profits back into startup companies which straddle its expertise of machine learning and automation.

XTX has unveiled in an interview given to business site Quartz (and on its own website) some more details about XTX Ventures, and the eight investments it has made to date.

The company appointed former Deutsche Bank corporate strategy executive and LSE graduate Ekaterina Holt as Head of XTX Ventures in 2018, and started making investments.

XTX looks at two different types of VC investing – early stage seed to Stage A rounds, mainly in machine learning companies and technologies, with an average check size of £200,000 – £2 million. And, larger strategic investments which can come at any stage, and are more focused on investments strategic to XTX Markets’ role as a liquidity provider.

Founded in 2015, XTX Markets is now the largest Spot FX liquidity provider globally, and and also the largest European equities liquidity provider. The company employs 143 people including 66 employees in the UK with offices also in New York, Singapore and Paris. The company transacts more than $200 billion daily in trading volumes across a variety of asset classes.

XTX’s current VC portfolio includes:

XTX was founded and is majority-owned by Russian-British mathematician Alex Gerko. Mr. Gerko, who holds a PhD in Mathematics from Moscow State University, started his financial career in equities and subsequently in FX at Deutsche Bank. Before founding XTX he headed up the market-making team at GSA Capital.