Before OpenAssets, Gabor Gurbacs and Kofi Mensah spent years embedded in financial institutions, building data infrastructure for investment management and trading operations. The work consistently circled the same problem: no standard way to normalize ownership records across custodians, no automated path from raw feed to reconciled position, and no first-class approach to producing the audit trail those reconciled records needed to carry.
Book closes ran two weeks not because the work was complex, but because the data was in the wrong shape. Analysts spent most of that time reformatting custodian exports and hunting discrepancies that a deterministic system could have caught the day they appeared.
Priya Chandrasekaran joined from the compliance side, bringing direct experience with what SEC, GLBA, and CFTC requirements actually need from a data layer. The three co-founders agreed: the right fix was not a better spreadsheet template or a compliance dashboard bolted onto a generic database. It was a data layer that treated ownership compliance as the design constraint from the first line of code.
OpenAssets was incorporated in 2024. The first pilot ran with two early-access firms in mid-2025. Angel funding closed in July 2025. Expanded early access opened in Q4 2025.