Key Takeaways
- KX is now an independent software company, giving us the focus to innovate faster and serve our customers and developers more effectively.
- In today’s real-time economy, the ability to act and adapt faster than the competition has become the ultimate advantage.
- Our long-standing expertise in time-series analytics puts us in a strong position to lead the next wave of AI, one where time context drives better decisions.
- By optimizing real-time workloads to run efficiently on GPUs, we’re helping customers dramatically accelerate tasks like backtesting and model development.
- We're launching a free community edition of kdb+, making our high-performance platform accessible to more developers than ever.
The real-time economy rewards speed, precision, and bold action. It’s a world where opportunities appear and vanish in seconds, supply chains reroute in real time, markets move before news breaks, and milliseconds define success or failure. Across industries, the ability to unlock the full potential of your data and AI to act faster and smarter has become the decisive advantage.
KX is now operating as an independent software company, built to lead this new era.
“It’s not just about being right anymore. You’ve got to be right at the right time. Speed decides survival.” – Ashok Reddy, CEO, KX
We recently hosted a livestream featuring our CEO, Ashok Reddy, and CMO, Peter Finter, to share our renewed vision and what this means for customers and our developer community. Their conversation covers:
- Why KX has emerged as an independent enterprise software company and what that means for your organization
- How we’re helping customers move faster and make better decisions in a real-time, high-volatility market
- What ‘Survival of the fastest’ really means (beyond speed of compute)
- The concept of temporal AI and why time-awareness is now critical for AI models and decision intelligence
- What’s next for the developer community, including early access to our free community edition of kdb+
Watch the session here:
Key takeaways from the session:
Staying true to our roots and sharpening our focus
Ashok opens the conversation by tracing the KX journey, from our Silicon Valley beginnings in 1993 through to today. With the sale of FD Technologies’ consulting divisions, we have returned to our origins: a pure-play software company focused solely on high-performance data and analytics.
“This move gives us the focus to innovate faster, serve customers better, and make our technology more accessible. Not just in capital markets but across industries like aerospace, defense, and manufacturing,” Ashok explains.
What we mean by ‘survival of the fastest’
Throughout the session, Peter and Ashok underscore the idea that in today’s real-time economy, speed is survival.
Ashok puts it plainly: “If you’re going to beat the market, you need to be faster than everyone else”. And that’s not just about technology moving faster; it’s about learning, innovating, and acting faster than your competition.
Real-time volatility, trillion-dollar market swings, and the surge of new data sources are making speed and decision-making accuracy the ultimate differentiators. In this environment, firms that can continuously adapt models, backtest strategies, and act on data in milliseconds are rewriting the rules of execution, research, and risk management in capital markets and beyond.
Temporal AI: Our next frontier
Ashok introduces the term temporal AI which he positions as the ability to understand and reason over data not just as static information, but as living streams evolving over time.
While most AI models today treat data as fixed snapshots, time context is increasingly essential for better decision-making, whether you’re backtesting trading strategies, monitoring market risks, or optimizing real-time operations. Knowing what happened is no longer enough, you also need to know when and how fast events unfold.
At KX, our foundation is built on time-series analytics. Building on this legacy, we see temporal AI as a natural and necessary evolution: one that will enable customers to move from simply observing change to deeply understanding it, acting faster, and with greater confidence.
GPUs, efficiency, and unlocking new possibilities
Ashok also discusses how we’re working with partners like NVIDIA to harness the full power of GPUs for real-time analytics, not just for AI, but complex, compute-heavy operations that sectors like capital markets depend on.
The value isn’t just in speeding things up. It’s in how we optimize where and how data gets processed. By reducing the need to move data between CPU and GPU memory and executing operations directly on GPU, we can lower latency and increase throughput. This includes support for operations like time-windowed joins and as-of joins, essential for time-sensitive workloads such as model backtesting, where delays quickly compound.
By running these workflows more efficiently, firms can iterate faster, test more scenarios in less time, and respond to changing market conditions without scaling infrastructure linearly.
Making the power of kdb+ available to all
As part of this next chapter, we announce that a community edition of our kdb+ platform, enhanced with native Python support, AI capabilities, and open data standards, will soon be available for free for commercial use (sign up to request early access at kx.com/research).
“We’re making it easier than ever for developers and data scientists to build with KX,” Ashok says. “Whether you’re working in capital markets or exploring new real-time use cases, this will open up powerful possibilities”.
Learn more about why KX is the high-performance analytical database for the AI era.
