OpenRound

A London company was opening private investment deals to ordinary investors. Regulated money, three legal jurisdictions, and nothing built.

We joined as founding engineer and built the platform from scratch.

Investor onboarding and capital participation flows. The PostgreSQL design behind investors, deals, and transactions. Third-party KYC and KYB checks wired into signup. Encryption, identity management, and network segmentation, with legal working alongside toward SOC 2 and GDPR across all three jurisdictions. An architecture redesign that took the AWS bill down by 70 percent. A team of eight across Canada, the UK, India, and Nepal.

More than $2 million in capital moved through it. The company was later acquired, and we stayed on afterward as Software Development Manager.

What made it hard

Three jurisdictions means three sets of rules, and the rules contradict each other in ways that nobody tells you about upfront. KYC and KYB compliance is where the fight usually is. Getting identity verification right meant working closely with legal at every step, not handing it over to them and waiting.

The 70 percent cost reduction on AWS did not come from clever optimization. It came from a moment where someone looked at a bill they could not defend and asked what we were actually paying for. The answer was waste that had accumulated while everyone was focused on shipping. Fixing it was straightforward once someone was looking.

The team

Eight people across four countries. Remote coordination at that scale requires more structure than most early companies want to put in place. We put it in place.