Octaura’s Loan Platform Turns 3: Lessons, Milestones, and What’s Next
This month, Octaura’s Loan Platform turns three. In market-structure time, that’s a blink, but in start-up time, that’s a lifetime. It has been three years of building through changing cycles, volatility, listening closely to our community, and learning what it takes to deliver technology that earns trust in the market.
What I’m most proud of isn’t just what we’ve shipped, it’s how we’ve shipped it: in partnership with dealers, asset managers, agents, and service providers who push for better workflows, better transparency, and better outcomes. That collaboration has shaped our roadmap from day one, and it’s the lens through which we’re thinking about the next phase of Octaura’s growth.
Three years of e-trading loans: key milestones
- Building the network. In three years, we have moved from a concept – Project Octopus – to a production platform supporting real, time-sensitive loan workflows, growing from 3 dealers and 34 buyside firms at launch, to now over 170 buyside clients and 30 dealers.
- Market share momentum. By April of 2024, Octaura secured 1% of the loan secondary market volume, doubling to 2% in June of that year. As of January 2026, Octaura captured 7.7% market share.
- Funding to support growth. By summer of 2025, Octaura successfully raised $46.5M in funding to support our rapid growth, underscoring the confidence we fostered in our investor base.
- Asset class expansion. In September of 2025, we launched our CLO platform – and in February of 2026 we introduced a new protocol to the market for CLO BWIC trading: Live Feedback, our latest innovation, offers a first-of-its kind live auction style protocol for list trades, giving both buy and sellside participants real-time color visibility.
- Developing better insights. Now, we’re focused on bringing market participants even more clarity on the loan market with pricing and liquidity metrics.
Lessons learned (and relearned)
- Trust from community is the most crucial asset. Our clients trust that Octaura will always remain committed to delivering best-in-class protocols and data solutions sits at the core of our success. We have fostered this trust over the years through close client relationships and always putting the customer at the center of what we do.
- Workflow beats novelty. The best innovation is the kind that fits naturally into how people trade, allocate, confirm, and settle – we must always meet the customer where they are and bring them on the journey to promote true change in market dynamics.
- Market stress can sometimes be the best indicator of success. Participation grows when the experience is fast, familiar, comprehensive, especially when markets are volatile. Through periods of hyper volatility over the last three years, we have seen how the demand for fast and reliable liquidity surges.
- Listen, ship, measure, repeat. The highest-impact improvements often come from careful attention to the details: and iterating quickly. Being first, and fast, is foundational to success.
What’s coming next: Continued evolution
As we look back on a stellar 3 years, we are excited to unveil some of the latest we have been hard at work on.
Voice Trading Protocol
Voice remains central to how the loan market functions, and it makes more sense than ever today thanks to our investments in system connectivity—integrating OMS solutions on the buyside and trade capture systems on the dealer side. Our Voice Trading Protocol leverages these advancements, enabling clients to take full advantage of straight-through processing (STP) in ways that simply weren’t possible before. By standardizing and digitizing voice workflows, the protocol preserves flexibility while streamlining post-trade processes, efficiently capturing key terms, improving downstream handoffs, and reducing manual steps from “agreed” to “done.”
A new and improved platform
Weve also rolled out an upgraded platform focused on the things that matter most in daily use: cleaner and faster experience, smarter defaults, and more intuitive navigation for high-velocity workflows. Under the hood, this upgrade to our underlying infrastructure will help strengthen our resiliency and scale more quickly, bring new features to market faster, and support the continued volume growth.
Insights where you need them
We know trading decisions rely on quality data. That’s why we’re investing in developing the highest quality pricing and liquidity metrics to fuel the insights we serve up to users. Watch this space for many more developments over the next few months.
Volume update: Records and sustained growth
In Q1 we saw a record-breaking quarter: 7.7% of the secondary leveraged loan market traded on the platform in January 2026, based on the latest trade volume data from the LSTA. March 2026 set a record month with $7.7bn traded across 1,322 loans, and closed a record quarter with over $19.6bn in Q1 26 volume.
To everyone who has traded, tested, challenged, and championed what we’re building—thank you. Octaura at three years old is a platform shaped by its community. We’re excited about what’s next: bringing voice and electronic workflows closer together, upgrading the experience, and continuing to scale responsibly with the market.
Thank you—and onward.
-Brian Bejile