Gammon’s story begins on opposite sides of the globe. Gammon was founded in 2015 in New York by Michael Mescher as a financial services firm focusing on structured arbitrage and quantitative investing in options. In 2016, Mr. Mescher began searching for programmers to help develop and optimize his existing strategies.

Meanwhile, based in Fukushima, Japan, Larry Richards began developing software to assist his own options trading in 2011. This activity ultimately led him to found Iota Technologies in 2013. Bringing to bear technical and leadership competence acquired during his nearly two decade career in wireless telecommunication infrastructure, Mr. Richards assembled and led a team of experts who, over 6 years, developed an advanced framework to help automate the process of developing and optimizing derivatives trading systems.

As Mr. Mescher began his search for a programming team, he was introduced to Mr. Richards and the Iota team in January of 2016. Through collaboration it became clear that the most logical and efficient path forward was for Gammon to acquire Iota's technology, which by that time comprised over one million lines of code plus a massive database of research quality, high granularity historical options market data. The acquisition was finalized in 2016 with Mr. Richards moving his entire team to Gammon, assuming the title of Chief Technology Officer, and expanding Gammon’s global footprint to Asia.