Two Sigma

The name is a double pun on sigma: lowercase for volatility, uppercase for summation, the idea of adding individual signals together. Two Sigma was founded in 2001 by John Overdeck and David Siegel, who met at D. E. Shaw, with seed capital from Paul Tudor Jones. Siegel holds an MIT computer science PhD; Overdeck is a Math Olympiad medalist who did a stint as technical assistant to Jeff Bezos at Amazon.

That engineering DNA defines the firm. Two Sigma runs a fully systematic process from data sourcing through modeling and execution, storing hundreds of petabytes from thousands of sources and running simulations on compute that rivals national supercomputing sites. Roughly two-thirds of its people sit in research and development, many drawn from physics, math, and CS rather than finance.