On June 23, 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, triggering one of the most significant regulatory and operational transitions in modern financial history. For global market makers operating across borders, the challenge wasn\u2019t just compliance, it was survival.<\/p>\n
At Citadel Securities \u2014 the world\u2019s leading market maker and part of Ken Griffin\u2019s >$60bn AUM Citadel behemoths \u2014 self-taught engineer Daniel Kornum (better known as DK) was tasked with leading that transition.<\/p>\n
DK was appointed Chief Operating Officer for the company\u2019s EMEA region while still in his early twenties, where he was responsible for ensuring zero trading downtime across equities, futures, options, and other securities during the most turbulent months of Brexit. Thanks to his hard work and innovation, Citadel would become the first major market maker to achieve that milestone. He\u2019s also earned public designation from the UK Financial Conduct Authority as both a material risk taker and person of significant control, titles typically reserved for top-tier executives at important institutions.<\/p>\n
From his meteoric rise through London\u2019s financial centre to his pioneering real-time data infrastructure for AI agents, DK\u2019s career is littered with significant milestones across data, finance, and emerging technology.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s a closer look.<\/p>\n
The mind behind the mission: An engineer, economist, and leader<\/p>\n
A self-taught coder, DK began building bots at a young age, becoming the #2 junior national chess champion in Denmark and the #3 ranked StarCraft II player in the world.<\/p>\n
He ended up at the University of Cambridge, where he studied economics and mathematics, graduating top of his class in corporate finance and publishing econometric research on market efficiency. DK also excelled athletically, breaking two world records in rowing and receiving the university\u2019s highest sports honours for skiing.<\/p>\n
DK has mentored over 500 students, built products to support thousands of finance applicants, and spoken at global case competitions and Denmark\u2019s Business Academy. His book, due out in October 2025 from Hans Reitzels Forlag, Denmark\u2019s largest and oldest publisher, explores how AI can be used to structure unstructured data pipelines, a continuation of his mission to bring engineering rigor into complex systems.<\/p>\n
After graduating, he took a position at McKinsey & Company in London, where he co-authored the firm\u2019s flagship banking productivity study, completely reshaping capital allocation frameworks used by banks across Europe.<\/p>\n
Citadel quickly took notice of DK\u2019s invaluable work for McKinsey, and it wasn\u2019t long before they brought him aboard via an executive headhunter.<\/p>\n
Building the systems that Brexit demanded: Strategy meets engineering<\/p>\n
While steering Citadel through the regulatory fog of Brexit, DK also led a transformation behind the scenes. Bond markets are notoriously fragmented, opaque, and vulnerable to execution issues. Dealing with trade toxicity had long been a known issue, but the team lacked a clear path to solving it both technically and operationally.<\/p>\n
DK came up with an ingenious Python-based benchmarking system that quantified fixed income execution quality in real time. His analytics parsed trading flows from a broad set of counterparties, diagnosing and predicting toxicity within bond markets.<\/p>\n
This tool became foundational for Citadel\u2019s infrastructure, and it was quickly integrated into the broader team\u2019s trading systems to inform decision-making across desks.<\/p>\n
Executing this amidst Brexit while simultaneously building infrastructure for execution quality cemented DK\u2019s reputation as both a high-trust operator and a deeply technical systems thinker.<\/p>\n
Following this achievement, DK was named a board representative as well as an executive and operating committee member for multiple Citadel entities.<\/p>\n
From Citadel to NakedSignal: Exporting enterprise infrastructure to the AI economy<\/p>\n
The systems DK built at Citadel had applications that extend beyond finance. They were a blueprint for how to operate during systemic disruption.<\/p>\n
After Brexit, he saw a broader pattern: the kind of real-time, fault-tolerant infrastructure that had kept global markets stable didn\u2019t exist outside the trading world. In high-stakes sectors like insurance, credit, and payments, intelligent automation was expanding but lacked the data backbone required to support it safely or effectively.<\/p>\n
This realisation became the foundation for NakedSignal, an infrastructure company building the real-time data layer for agentic AI.<\/p>\n
Unlike many AI startups focused on model performance, DK\u2019s vision was to solve the infrastructure bottleneck by building structured, low-latency, real-time data pipelines designed specifically for agentic AI. These autonomous systems are poised to transform industries but, as they become more embedded in real-world workflows, their performance will depend on the quality and immediacy of the data they consume.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s where NakedSignal comes in. The AI Agent space will soon become dominant, and the market for data underpinning it is bound to explode. Recent speculation indicates that NakedSignal is in early-stage discussions with strategic government agencies and sovereign wealth funds, underscoring the geopolitical importance of real-time data infrastructure and the company\u2019s immense potential.<\/p>\n
For DK, this isn\u2019t a departure from his Citadel career; it\u2019s a direct continuation of it. NakedSignal takes the discipline of Brexit-era infrastructure and applies it to AI adoption at scale, the next major systemic shift.<\/p>\n
What Brexit revealed \u2014 and why it still matters<\/p>\n
Brexit revealed what many institutions are only now realising: in moments of systemic uncertainty, resilience comes down to infrastructure. DK\u2019s zero-downtime execution at Citadel wasn\u2019t just an operations win; it was proof of what\u2019s possible at the intersection of strategy, engineering, and regulatory understanding.<\/p>\n