Varun Batra

I spent 15 years building quantitative infrastructure at institutional hedge funds — pricing engines, risk systems, and data pipelines across fixed income, equities and derivatives, as well as the infrastructure needed for systematic strategies and portfolio optimisation using multi-factor models. Most recently, I was Quant & Technology Lead for the London office of a major global macro fund — responsible for pricing engines, risk analytics, IR curve modelling, onboarding new products into risk systems, and working directly with Portfolio Managers to build the bespoke tools they needed to generate and execute trade ideas.

Before that, I worked at a leading global investment bank in New York on fixed income risk systems and regulatory capital, and earlier at an equity long/short fund applying factor models to portfolio risk analytics. Across all of these roles, the common thread was the same: taking complex financial instruments — interest rate swaps, swaptions, cap/floors, equity options, FX options and exotics, futures and futures options — and building the systems that make precise risk analysis possible.

Over my career I have worked with both extremes — funds that built everything from scratch in-house, and funds that relied entirely on large vendor platforms. Each has its place, but neither is a clean solution. Custom builds require the right people and take time to get right. Vendor platforms are built for the broadest use case, which rarely maps precisely to any individual fund's instruments, workflows, or risk framework. Most funds end up navigating a trade-off between the two.

What changed my thinking was seeing how much faster it is now to build well-engineered, bespoke systems — with modern Python tooling, better libraries, and the advent of LLM-assisted development. The gap between "build" and "buy" has narrowed substantially — what was once a months-long delivery is now a matter of weeks. That is what made starting Syena feel like the right moment: the ability to deliver institutional-quality infrastructure at a speed and cost that previously wasn't possible outside of a large firm.

The other thing I kept coming back to was the PM relationship. The best infrastructure I ever built came directly from sitting with a Portfolio Manager, understanding exactly what they were trying to see or do, and building precisely that — not a generalised tool, not a vendor module configured to approximate the need. That direct translation from requirement to working system is what I want Syena to be known for.