Update: The HFT EdTech Startup I Posted About Last Year Now Has Paying Customers - Opening Up 2 Angel Slots

Follow-up to my June 2025 post

Just over a year ago I posted here looking for a business/strategy co-founder for a technical HFT education startup I was mentoring and backing as an angel. Good news: that seat got filled, the team is complete, and in the meantime they've kept building. Figured an honest update was overdue, because they're now raising, and I said I'd bring the opportunity back here.

What's changed since last June
The co-founder seat is filled. Product/business side now has real ownership, not just technical founders.
We shipped. The MVP became a real, paying product.
We have actual customers, across multiple countries — not just beta testers.
We're charging $400–500 per course, and people are paying it, which tells us the depth (real systems, real infra, real C++, real quant strategy — not another "Python bot" course) is landing with the audience it was built for.
Monthly revenue is currently ~$1,000–1,500, from roughly 2–3 course sales a month.

I want to be upfront about scale: this is early, unglamorous, single-digit-sales-a-month revenue — not a hockey stick yet. But it's real money from real strangers who found the content credible enough to pay a premium price for it, in a niche (elite quant/HFT skills) that is notoriously hard to sell into. That's the signal that matters to me as an angel: retention of quality over vanity growth.

The team
2 core founders with genuine top-tier HFT backgrounds (the technical depth is not fluff — this is the team's actual edge)
A business/strategy co-founder now on board driving GTM and product
A few more across tech, content, and marketing
International founding team, plus an existing small investor pool (myself included)
What they're raising now

With the founding team complete and early paying customers validating the price point, the team is raising a small round to fund content production, B2B outreach into trading teams and funds, and international expansion.

Opening up 2 angel slots at $25K each.

To be clear-eyed: at ~$1,500/month revenue, this is a bet on the team, the niche, and the early signal — not a bet on current scale. Ask hard questions, look at the real numbers, and talk to the founders directly before committing anything.

How this works

I'm not a founder - I'm an angel and mentor who happens to like connecting good people to good teams, and I don't disappear after writing a check, so I vet who I introduce. If you're seriously interested in one of the two angel slots:

Drop a comment with your email and I'll pass it directly to the founders — they'll reach out with the deck, product preview, and real numbers, no middleman after that.

— Ash, Angel Investor | Ex-Founder | Product/Tech Mentor