For now, Doomsun is bootstrapped with personal money and a little under $300,000 in angel funding. The startup is also a recipient of a 2026 LaunchLNK grant of $20,000 in non-dilutive funding.
And though it is fueled by environmentalist goals, the startup’s trading tools are market agnostic to sell across the finance world.
“We have investors that want to see us make good on that long-term goal of impactful investing in the energy transition space,” Smith said. “But to get there, we need to generate revenue. We need these (trading) tools to do it anyway. So we’re going to build the sharp tools.”
For the love of engineering
Doomsun co-founders Smith and Daemian Mack, the company’s CTO who lives in North Carolina, have worked together over the past 11 years at a variety of fintech companies, including Nubank, a global digital bank based in Brazil.
They had often talked about creating their own startup for algorithmic financial trading. Smith developed an interest after experimenting with automated trading during the 2017 cryptocurrency boom and working on the tech infrastructure for hedge funds and investment banks.
“We specialize in distributed systems development,” Smith said. “Which is a fancy way of saying when you have a whole bunch of separate (computer) systems that need to communicate, usually over a network, and have very complex interactions, there are a whole host of things you need to consider” — such as security, speed of communication and preventing errors.
Smith and Mack think of financial markets in a similar way. Markets are always changing based on stock prices, investor sentiment, interest rates and company earnings, among other “systems.” As they see it, understanding those complex interactions, figuring out the best investment strategy and automating it is mostly an engineering issue.