When EXANTE was founded back in 2011, open-source software was not a philosophical choice; it was a practical one. The tools existed, they worked, and they let a small team of technologists build something serious without reinventing every wheel. Fifteen years later, EXANTE is a prime broker serving 20,000+ professional investors in more than 100 countries and managing over $4 billion in client assets. The wheels are still turning. In June 2026, the company decided it was time to help maintain them.
Gecko Fund is a €1 million grant programme created to fund the open-source projects that quietly underpin global trading infrastructure. APIs, serialisation libraries, data pipelines; the unglamorous stuff that financial platforms run on. The programme does not fund new projects looking for their first break. It funds existing tools that are already carrying serious weight but are not getting paid for it.
The Free Software Problem Nobody Talks About
Open-source software runs about 70% of businesses worldwide. In financial services, that number is probably higher. The same libraries and frameworks that power consumer apps also process trade orders, manage market data feeds, and handle risk calculations at major institutions. The estimated global demand-side value of open source is around $8.8 trillion.
The people maintaining it often work for free. Around 63% of maintainers of widely used projects lack adequate funding, according to research from Sovereign Tech. Some of the most depended-upon tools in existence are kept alive by one or two people who do it because they care, not because anyone is paying them to. That creates a quiet fragility that the industry has mostly chosen not to think about.
AI is making that harder to ignore. The same acceleration that speeds up software development also accelerates vulnerability discovery. A poorly maintained library with a known flaw is now a faster target than it was three years ago.
The First Grant Goes To a 17-Year-Old Project
Gecko Fund’s first award was €10,000 to Kryo, a Java serialisation framework built in 2009 and maintained since by two people across two continents. Kryo is used in high-performance data processing and trading environments. It had never received outside funding before this grant.
“Critical open-source work often happens quietly, even as major industries depend on it,” said Nathan Sweet, creator of Kryo. “We are grateful to EXANTE and Gecko Fund for making that dependence reciprocal.”
The choice is worth noting. Kryo is not a startup. It is not seeking attention. It is a tool that has been doing its job reliably for nearly two decades, mostly unacknowledged. Starting there says something about what the fund is actually trying to do.
Why EXANTE Is Doing This?
Anatoly Knyazev, co-founder of EXANTE and founder of Gecko Fund, framed the rationale plainly. “When we started building EXANTE more than fifteen years ago, open-source software made it possible to move quickly and solve problems that would otherwise have been out of reach. Our goal is not simply to fund software. It is to strengthen the communities and maintainers behind the infrastructure that modern finance depends on every day.”
Richard Forss, EXANTE’s Chief Technology Officer, made the operational case. “Nearly 70% of our critical technology stack relies on open-source software — and we’re far from alone. Open-source infrastructure is not a charity case. It is load-bearing technology that underpins modern businesses, financial markets, and critical services worldwide. Gecko Fund is our way of helping ensure that this infrastructure remains resilient, secure, and sustainable.”
The fund reviews applications quarterly. Grants range from €10,000 to €150,000 depending on scope and impact. Priority areas include Erlang/OTP, Scala, Java/JVM, JavaScript, developer tooling, and core infrastructure libraries with relevance to financial systems. Individuals, teams, communities, and organisations are all eligible to apply.
Applications are open at geckofund.org.
