team

The Captain

Daijiro Nishi spent decades trading interest rate derivatives at JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, Société Générale, and SMBC Nikko Securities, where he ran FX and IR derivatives desks. He knows how institutional finance works—and where it breaks.

Now as CEO of Nippotica Corporation and Senior Director at University of Tokyo’s Development Office, he bridges Japanese institutional markets with cutting-edge technology, applying decades of trading discipline to building companies that deliver solutions at scale.

The Marketer

Tsuyoshi Hatao brings 29 years of financial services expertise—from structuring derivatives at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan to leading BlackRock’s Aladdin Wealth Tech in Japan. He understands both sides of the equation: the quantitative rigor of risk analytics and the strategic realities of selling solutions to Japanese institutional clients. With a Master’s in Computational and Applied Mathematics from University of Tokyo, he combines deep technical knowledge with practical business insight—knowing what works in Japan’s financial services market and why.

Now as CMO of Nippotica Corporation, he translates that experience into impactful go-to-market strategies.

The Innovator

Larry Richards-Ando spent decades translating algorithms into executable code at scale. After leading infrastructure teams at NEC, Ericsson, and Alcatel-Lucent across Asia, he pivoted to quantitative finance—founding Iota Technologies and serving as CTO of Gammon Capital, where he built option trading systems that actually worked. At SMBC Nikko Securities, he developed hedging algorithms for Treasury positions and taught derivatives traders applied machine learning.

Fluent in Japanese with deep expertise in predictive modeling and numerical methods, he bridges quantitative sophistication with execution discipline—understanding that elegant code means nothing if it can’t survive market turbulence.

Larry is the developer of Vollib, a Python library that builds on Peter Jäckel’s Let’s Be Rational algorithm to efficiently compute option prices, implied volatility, and greeks.

The Strategist

Kambiz Homayounfar has spent four decades building and selling deep tech solutions. He founded three successful ventures—Algorex (acquired by National Semiconductor), Genista (acquired by Symmetricom), and Phybit (private equity exit)—signing global clients from AT&T to Sony along the way. His expertise spans signal computing, parallel computing, and computational vision, with multiple patents in high-performance systems.

Today as Chief Strategy Officer of Nippotica and CEO of Algotechniq, he applies this technical depth to building AI-powered solutions for Japanese institutional clients, translating algorithms into systems that are simple enough to buy, complex enough to matter.

Kambiz’s academic papers are available on Google Scholar, and his technical essays appear on Medium and Substack.