Why Every Major Bank Still Uses 1965 Technology: The Trading 'Rails' Revolution That Changes Everything | Ep 291 with Peter Ashton CEO of Veyra Holdings

0:04So, Peter, it's really great to have you. We were just talking about how AI is basically transforming every single aspect of our life. And I can't wait to dive into what Vara is doing and how it's transforming trading and, I mean, developed by a NASA scientist. So let's just dive into this because I have to understand, what is the difference between artificial intelligence and mathematical intelligence? Yeah, mathematical intelligence is essentially the laws that govern the data. So it uses math to calculate and make sure that the laws are absolute and they don't change. Then you can load the data.

0:51So it's all about data compression. And then artificial intelligence, right, essentially says based off what I've seen is likely to happen. And mathematical intelligence is essentially, these are the systems that I obey. And because of that, this has to happen. so it's not very well known um it not many people talk about it because it's not as sexy as you know talking about ai but math is essentially the the framework the ground framework that we load data into to get an outcome and that outcome is a projection of what that data set is and as if you can compress it and use math to identify what uh you're looking at you can actually predict at an incredibly high accuracy rate, you know, like in the markets or in anything, weather patterns, or it doesn't matter what it is.

1:45You have to use math, right, to take all those data sets, compress it down, and then you can use AI as an overlay. So that's really the two difference. I'm fascinated by the ability that AI can do, I guess, in this instance, mathematical mathematical intelligence, what it could do at such a high level that it's definitely smarter than I am. We may not be in what they call AGI, right? But I feel like it's way smarter than me. So when you started going from, you know, you were a really into sports division one football player, and then you started getting into this and learning about mathematical intelligence.

2:26How was that transition? You know, it was a hard transition going from, you know, playing sports my entire life. Right. And then, you know, that, what that being done, and then you don't really know what to do. So I actually had a venture capital firm in 2020 for about two years. And my business partner was the founder of Funimation and they created Dragon Ball Z. And so because of that and that partnership, I was able to go find really cool founders and really cool people building disruptive technologies. And I found that everybody was trying to find a way to predict the markets, right? You know, a couple of years ago.

3:08So these are people, you know, having these cool technologies to predict, you know, what Tesla is going to do tomorrow or NVIDIA is going to do tomorrow. But it wasn't, no one really had the right testing or the right technology to do it. and that's when I found a guy that I ran across and he had this technology that was built in the early mid to late 80s and he was a NASA scientist and he used aerospace missile identification technology to modify it for the markets and all you do is he built an operating system where you basically load data of a given symbol, right? The history of a symbol, right?

3:47and you can use that to predict where that symbol is going to go in the future and that was like my first like this is cool it's crazy because most people think like hey i was invented you know jgbt uh not that it's you know been around for 70 years and and things from the 80s are even more relevant now uh than ever when you what what like type of results like what were you seeing because this is something I've been very, very interested. And I've been waiting for this, waiting for something to come out like this. I'm really big in the markets. And of course, like you're saying, you know, I've been thinking like, how can AI, you know, how can automation and these things have a great positive impact for people like myself?

4:37So what type of results, what were you seeing as you started to use this technology? Yeah, we didn't want to look at like have AI tell me what to invest in. Like that's what a lot of people are trying to do. We wanted to find and use data. So not so much all the data that we're using, you can see in a five minute, what's called time series stacking. So you stack one time frame on top of one another for whatever symbol you want to trade in the market. And you get a higher accuracy when multiple time frames line up. right and so when you can predict in the next five minutes 15 30 hour you know 240 minutes and you can project project out in advance and you have this like alignment it's a it's a very it's really weird but it's really cool when you see the alignment and it will tell you when to make a trade and when to not make a trade and so we took that and i started testing it myself Granted, in the beginning, I lost a lot of money.

5:38So you have to test it and see what works and what doesn't work. And we found that people just want a simplistic way of tell me what to buy and tell me when to sell. And if you don't want to do that, just automate the whole thing for me. So we wanted to tailor this type of trading software not to the accredited investors or qualified clients or family offices and so forth. We wanted to tailor it to the general population. And so anybody will be able to use our software and trade$100 or$500 or$10 ,000, right? You can just load it into our system, pick what you want to trade, and click start, and it will auto-trade for you.

6:20You're talking about something that has not been available to the public. We're democratizing institutional-level trading products to the general population and only doing it as a subscription-based system. So we don't take any performance. It's all subscription-based. Yeah, I was going to say, democratize actually came to my mind as you were explaining it. And it gives, like you're saying, it's kind of been this thing where the wealthiest of people have access to great, smart resources and people, which enables them to be able to do these things in the past. But unless you're at a certain level, it would have been hard, right?

7:00You would have had to do this yourself. So I could see where the democratization comes into play. So something though, that I think is very different among how you are doing business. And that's the amount of co-founders that you have. Um, I know, I believe it's like around nine to 10 co-founders. Uh, and I mean, I've had, you know, I've had great experiences with just one and horrible experiences with just one. Um, but I think it's your CEO has raised over 130 billion on Wall Street. One of your co-founders played major league baseball for over a decade. How did this all come about? I'm very good at doing just a few things, right?

7:46And I'm trying to triple down on those things, right? And the team that I brought, they all care about this idea of making the unwealthy wealthy, right? They've spent the last 10, 20, 30 years of their careers making the rich richer. And the gap is getting larger and larger, right? And so when I was able to cast this vision to them of building something that anybody's brother, sister, cousin, friends of friends can click and download and trade and make high returns, right? With no catch, just you pay your subscription. fee, that resonated with a lot of these people. And so I had to, in order to scale quickly, right, I needed to bring in a team and basically gave them equity of the company in order to help me build it.

8:37And so they all have their boundaries, right? Everybody has ideas, but the vision is still the vision, right? You can have ideas, but you can't change the future trajectory of the business, right? Because that's, that's what we're all came together to do. So yes, we have like nine plus co-founders, essentially. But the vision that I've kind of casted, like that's the direction we're all, we're all moving together. I mean, that's, you know, I could see the more ambassador ambassadors you have of your company, the more people rooting for you, the more people that skin in the game. It's going to enable you, like you're saying, to scale and grow.

9:19How big do you think that this company could go? What is your long-term vision? So when we started, we started the company six months ago, right around six months ago. And I was going to fund the business. And then it got to a point where we needed to bring on more and more people. And so we decided to do a small capital raise. We decided to raise a two and a half million at a$50 million valuation. The reason why we did that was we established a very strong distribution channel where this company, they essentially, they market and they launch newsletters that capture customers and we can market our product directly to them.

9:58And so we decided to partner together and do an equity swap, right, to establish our distribution channel. And we're getting 20 ,000 people a day in those newsletters. So we're at 550 ,000 currently in our network. So if we do just a simple conversion, right, you know, our flagship product to, you know, anybody can see the future direction of whatever symbol they want to trade, right? No automation, just simple. That's$4.99 a month. So it's very, you know, it doesn't cost that much. And if we do a 3 % conversion on$550 ,000, that's a lot of recurring revenue. And so all we need is about 15 ,000 to 20 ,000 people paying$500 a month, and we can sell the business for a billion dollars.

10:45So that was the metric around the valuation side, how big it can go. I think it can go to 100 ,000 people using our product because it's just so simple. I want the peace of mind knowing what my portfolio is going to do in the future. So I'll pay 500 bucks a month to essentially have confidence that it's going to trend in whatever direction that I'm going either long or short. Yeah, I like how it kind of sounds like you kind of looked at the end result and then you kind of created the math to get there. And then you're like, OK, in order for me to get to like a billion sale, I need to do all these things in the middle to get there.

11:29And if I want to do that, that means I need to partner and those things. How is that? Because I'm with you. I feel like lead generation, like traditional lead generation is becoming harder and harder. I feel like there's just so much noise on, you know, how many LinkedIn messages do you get a day? Or now there's, you know, AI is automating so much email. So I'm getting like a million emails every day of someone trying to sell something. So I feel like from a, you know, app perspective, a company that collaborating with these type of partnerships might be the best thing that most people can do.

12:05What is your thought around just how noisy just all lead generation seems to be getting and how partnerships can play into helping anyone who makes an app become successfully helpful? Each lead generation caters to a select group of people. So if someone messaged me on LinkedIn, like, hey, I can generate 25 leads to you. Well, that's great, but they don't know what my company does or my product is. So they just message me and message you probably and say, hey, I can generate 25. Who are those leads? What do they do? So I think you have to understand your target market, right? And most of the time, SaaS companies, it takes between two and three pivots to establish your go-to-market strategy, right?

12:55You pivot one time and then a lot of times you have to raise additional dollars to hit that. So it's hard to find that product market fit. And what you do is you have to talk to your customers. You have to talk to the people that are using your product to refine it and tailor it. And so we decided to go down the route of forming strong partnerships with companies to scale faster. So forget all the equity, forget all the revenue streams, forget all that. If you're building a business for enterprise value, none of that matters as long as you book all the revenue. So as long as you can just book the revenue and drive enterprise value, it doesn't matter about how much equity you have because a small piece of a large company is better than a large piece of a small company.

13:38So, you know, that's how that's the route we went. And it's it's going to pay off quite a lot because we're looking at, you know, January, February, March, really driving in and launching this these products to people and have an awesome 2026 year for us. Do you think that AI is going to allow more people to get into business? Or do you or I guess and or do you think AI is just going to create a massive amount of competition? I think both. You know, with all the competition comes a lot of new businesses. But everybody is in the AI space, right? They're all running on old like old traditional rails.

14:22So all the AI, all the quants, you know, there's really only been three iterations since 1822, right? And so we're that third of rails. I call them rails because they're built on, all this is built on math. So 1822, Joseph Furier built Furier transform. 1965, they built a faster version and that's been it. So all the quants, all the major financial firms, everybody in the world, they're using these old rails. but the original rails that were built in 1965 were made to use for computers. Well, now you have algorithmic trading systems, right? It's in this age of automation. Well, those old rails are slow now.

15:08And so that's why there's so many AI companies popping up is because there's gaps in the market. There's gaps in this so people, oh, I'll just create an AI company, right? Because it's easy to do. So I think there's a lot of noise, right? And if you get down to it, if you can build new rails that everybody can now use, that's faster. You eliminate those gaps in the market, which means there's less companies out there and the markets become less saturated. And I didn't even what you just said. I had no idea. Like, that's how the intricacies worked or behind the scenes. So thank you for sharing that.

15:46I guess we'll see in a year, two, three years, all of the explosion of companies that started 2024, 2025, maybe even 2026, if they're still around as the competition. Plus, I mean, the technology just it's like, you know, Gemini just announced version three, which is faster than, you know, ChatGBT faster. It's like every two weeks or some advancement in some LLM or something coming out just overall. So it's what an exciting space. I mean, I really love what you do. I've been waiting and waiting for something to come out that you're doing that I can implement. So let's say it's somebody like myself and I want to get started.

16:28I know, like you said, it's not something it's it's a few hundred dollars. And I think this could be something really beneficial for me. How can I get started? it? Yeah. So if you go to our website, so it's veraholdings.ai, you can get started. And we're going to be launching a series of products over the next six months that are tailored to the everyday person who wants to make money in the markets, right? By trading$100 ,000,$200 ,000, $500 ,000,$10 ,000, right? There's a limit. But from that side, as you go to our website, you sign up and you have access to all of our products. You can pick and choose what you want to trade.

17:08Or you can trade yourself by using our charts. It's pretty simple. Well, Peter Ashton, CEO of Vera AI, super excited. I love saying earlier, I love the background. I really thought you had a fake background. I need to get that. I need to get the TV behind me. It looks amazing. I'm really excited about what you're doing. I learned a lot today. I never heard of mathematic intelligence. I didn't know about the rails. I'm learning a ton by talking to very intelligent people like yourself. And I'm excited. After you sell for a billion dollars, come back. And I want to know what life is like post-retirement.

17:50But thank you so much, by the way, for joining us today. Thank you. I appreciate it.