Martin Franchi

Chief Executive Officer NinjaTrader Group

Last Reviewed: September 26, 2026

Executive Summary

Martin Franchi is Chief Executive Officer of NinjaTrader Group, the Chicago company behind the NinjaTrader and Tradovate futures trading platforms and a CFTC-registered futures commission merchant. He has led it through a run of transactions that turned a trading-software business into a full retail futures brokerage: a growth investment from Long Ridge Equity Partners in 2020, the purchase of Transact Futures’ clearing operations in 2021, and the acquisition of Tradovate in 2022. In March 2025 Kraken agreed to buy NinjaTrader for $1.5 billion, and it now operates as a standalone platform within Kraken’s parent, Payward, Inc., still under Franchi.

Career Highlights

• CEO of NinjaTrader when Kraken agreed to acquire it for $1.5 billion in March 2025, a deal Kraken described as the largest ever combining traditional finance and crypto.
• Announced NinjaTrader’s majority growth investment led by Long Ridge Equity Partners, alongside DRW Venture Capital, in January 2020.
• Took NinjaTrader into clearing with the acquisition of Transact Futures’ clearing operations in January 2021.
• Acquired Tradovate in January 2022, creating a combined retail futures broker that the company said handled about 100 million contracts in 2021.
• Appointed NinjaTrader Group’s first Chief Innovation & AI Officer in July 2026 and launched the NinjaTrader Innovation Lab for AI trading tools in September 2026.

Professional Journey

Franchi grew up in Chicago. In a 2025 interview he said his grandfather, who ran a commodity-focused business and hedged with futures, introduced him to the markets and to technical analysis. He joined NinjaTrader in 2014. The company describes him as having joined “early in the company’s startup phase”, when NinjaTrader, founded in 2003, was mainly a desktop trading application whose software was free until a user traded live.

By January 2020 he was chief executive. That month NinjaTrader announced a majority growth investment led by Long Ridge Equity Partners with DRW Venture Capital. Franchi tied the timing to the demand that had followed the recent introduction of retail-focused futures products. The next two years changed the business. In January 2021 NinjaTrader acquired the clearing operations of Transact Futures, and in January 2022 it bought Tradovate, the cloud-based futures broker founded by Rick Tomsic. The Tradovate release named Franchi as “CEO of NinjaTrader Group, LLC”, the holding structure that now sits over the NinjaTrader software company and the NinjaTrader Clearing brokerage.

From 2022 to 2024 he built out a senior team around him: a first Chief Technology Officer, Hazim Macky, reporting to him in 2022; new executive hires in May 2024; and Tobin McDaniel as President that August.

On 20 March 2025 Kraken announced an agreement to acquire NinjaTrader for $1.5 billion. The attraction was NinjaTrader’s CFTC-registered FCM licence, which lets Kraken offer futures and derivatives to US clients, while Kraken’s UK, EU and Australian licences would carry NinjaTrader abroad. Franchi presented it as scale: “Joining forces with Kraken allows us to take this vision to a global scale.” Kraken reports NinjaTrader in its results from 1 May 2025, and the business now runs as one of the platforms of Payward, Inc., Kraken’s parent.

Since the acquisition Franchi has stayed chief executive. The 2026 announcements have centred on AI and new products: a Chief Innovation & AI Officer and a new Chief Product Officer in July, CME Group single stock futures later that month, and in September an Innovation Lab for AI tools that turn traders’ ideas into testable strategies. NinjaTrader now says it serves more than 3.5 million traders.

Education

No education record was found in a first-party or primary source. A university degree attributed to him by a wiki and contact-data aggregators could not be verified and is not recorded.