Sunny Ray sits down with Austin Trombley, founder of liquidity.io, to trace his path from a Kansas childhood through Fortune 500 consulting at Accenture, Wells Fargo and Sprint into the frontier of AI driven private credit and blockchain infrastructure. Trombley explains how liquidity.io and its subsidiaries, including simplicity.io and equitytable.io, compress compliance, transfer agency and cap table costs using one of only seven digital alternative trading systems in existence. He recounts learning SAS through a memorable goat milk bet, later mastering R and Python, and building machine learning models at Prosper Marketplace and his hedge fund Random Forest Capital, whose zip code level insights into borrower behavior led to its acquisition by Franklin Templeton. Trombley details how that acquisition produced the Benji app, Franklin's first direct to investor platform, and reflects on why decentralization could paradoxically fragment the investor experience. Along the way he shares his early Bitcoin mining days, his global ICO, and why he believes tokenized data, not just tokenized assets, will reshape how trillions in private markets get priced and traded.
From goat milk coding lessons to a Franklin Templeton acquisition, Austin Trombley explains how data and tokenization are unlocking trillions in private markets.
What is liquidity.io and what are you working on there?
Liquidity.io houses several operating companies. We own simplicity.io, a compliance platform doing KYC, PEPs, sanctions, e-signature and investor accreditation, which cut accredited investor onboarding costs from about $35 to $1.20. We also own a blockchain based transfer agency and one of only seven digital alternative trading systems in existence, which legally lets us tokenize securities. Coinbase, Kraken and Ripple don't have this license.
Where did you grow up and what were you like as a kid before finance and tech?
I grew up in Overland Park, Kansas, and spent most of my professional life in San Francisco. I went to a small Jesuit high school there called Rockhurst. It was an incredible experience and a great city to grow up in.
What did working inside big Fortune 500 companies like Wells Fargo, Accenture and Sprint teach you?
Consulting is tough but I suggest everyone try it. At Accenture you get dropped in and have three to six months to create an inordinate amount of value, while at a normal Fortune 500 like Wells Fargo there's less urgency. I saw more in my years consulting for clients like Safeway, Visa and AT&T than in ten years elsewhere, and it trained me to learn fast and eventually build on my own.
How did you end up learning to code in SAS, R and Python when most MBAs weren't touching code?
At Sprint the data lived on an old mainframe accessible only through SAS, and I kept bugging a coworker named Chuck to pull data for me. He agreed to teach me only if I drank a full mason jar of his homemade goat milk, which I did for a donut. I later learned R through a Berkeley program and then moved to Python, which I compare to R being Batman and Python being Superman.
What did running analytics at Prosper Marketplace teach you?
Prosper was the first to originate loans as a non-bank and sell them to retail investors. Naysayers said retail investors were too unsophisticated for private credit, but once we exposed years of loan level data through a public API, investors could convince themselves they could hit their target returns. We went from originating five million a month to five hundred fifty million in eight months by empowering investors with data.
Was there a specific moment that made you realize you'd build your own thing instead of climbing the corporate ladder?
Mentors like Doug Dillard and BlackRock's Ken Kroner influenced me, but building my AI hedge fund, Random Forest Capital, was the real turning point. Unlike quants chasing liquid assets, we focused on pricing illiquid private credit correctly upfront. We proved our model by identifying the best zip codes to lend in, finding Amish communities in Pennsylvania rarely defaulted and Hispanic truck owners in Texas prioritized auto loans, which impressed firms like Fortress and Magnetar.
What was your first real encounter with Bitcoin and blockchain?
I started on the mining side with Antminer S9s stacked floor to ceiling at home, machines that whistled like jet engines and smelled like burnt plastic. When my now wife first visited, she asked if we could turn them off at night and I said no, that's free money. From there I moved into the software side and developed a deep appreciation for decentralization.
What did getting acquired by Franklin Templeton teach you about how traditional finance works internally?
It became what they called a quantamental strategy, human guided AI pricing bonds across the private credit stack. My hedge fund was folded into building the first blockchain based transfer agency and the Benji app, Franklin's first direct to investor platform. Before that, Franklin never knew who actually bought their funds since prime brokers distributed everything, which made it hard to build products investors actually wanted.
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