Prague-based company is one of the biggest traders in Europe’s intraday market, where contracts are bought and sold almost in real time
In the span of five years, Second Foundation has come from nowhere to dominate Europe’s most volatile power market, driven by algorithms and riddle-loving ‘mathletes’ raised on science fiction and the ideas of American author Isaac Asimov.
The Prague-based company is now one of the biggest traders in Europe’s intraday market, where contracts are bought and sold almost in real time to match constantly shifting, renewable electricity supply. Once a niche corner left to the most junior traders, it’s now the fastest growing segment where gaining even a millisecond can give you an edge. Second Foundation’s three founders draw inspiration from science fiction, where elite mathematical minds shape civilisation and artificial intelligence is boundless. The company itself takes its name from the third book in Asimov’s Foundation series, and each new employee is presented with a copy.
In Asimov’s foundation saga, the brightest scientists are gathered on a single planet called Terminus (one of the meeting rooms at Second Foundation is named after that planet.) In the book, a smaller secretive group known as the Second Foundation who can control people’s minds exist on another planet, led by a powerful character called the First Speaker.
“They sometimes call me First Speaker around here for fun,” co-founder and chief executive officer Vojtech Kacena said in an interview at the firm’s central Prague office.
Like many of the biggest hedge funds and brokerages, the company seeks out analytical prodigies that have honed their skills at events like the International Mathematical Olympiad, the world’s most prestigious competition. Kacena takes pride in what has become the company’s signature asset: a concentration of medallists from Eastern Europe — more than Citadel and Jane Street, who also hire them, he said.
Competitive problem-solving is a central part of the firm’s culture, where team building might involve an overnight puzzle-deciphering race in which teams crack codes by head-torch around the streets of Prague. “We hire a lot of these brilliant guys who are sometimes a little bit lost,” Kacena said. “We try to give them purpose.”
The build out of renewables has dramatically changed short-term power markets. Prices now move so fast that only computers can trade (people are still needed to write and manage the algorithms). As solar and wind generation swings, prices can spike to as much as €1,000 per megawatt-hour and plunge below zero. The market is known for generating billions in profits for firms clustered around Aarhus, Denmark.
The Danish energy traders, like InCommodities, MFT Energy and Danske Commodities, were the first in the industry to make computer-driven trading their main business, and Aarhus has grown into a centre for the new wave. These firms were made famous during the energy crisis in 2022 when they raked in huge profits as prices soared.
Intraday trading is a volume-driven, highly competitive market. Danske Commodities, which has operated for more than two decades, runs a strategy similar to Second Foundation. There are other newcomers like twig.energy and Alipes ApS and as more firms chase the same trades and margins shrink, companies are being pushed to find growth in other markets.
Kacena says Second Foundation is trying to do something different.
“We are a tech company, not a trading house,” Kacena said. “We don’t have this kind of rainmaking trader.”
Of Second Foundation’s 420 employees, 100 are analysts, among them many data scientists, and around 150 are software developers with just 30 are traders. This contrasts with the traditional team structure in commodity trading houses, where traders are hired first and data and engineering capabilities built around them.
“We see a new era in short-term power trading,” said Patrick Reynolds, founder of recruiting firm NordSearch, “Algo-driven strategies are changing the way firms hire, with quantitative specialists increasingly favoured over fundamental-focused discretionary traders.”Filip Cermak, a 27-year old quantitative researcher at Second Foundation, first heard about the firm from friends he knew from maths competitions. “They told me it was a place where you solve maths problems,” said the computer science graduate. “It sounded fun.”
To predict short-term power prices, vast amounts of data are required – from wind speeds to cloud cover – and this heavy use of real-time information is what sets power apart from other energy markets. Algorithms are used to analyse millions of data points like weather, satellite images, and grid flows to forecast supply and demand shifts.
The companies with the best data, the strongest models, and the fastest execution of trades are the ones that succeed.
“All that matters is, if you are good at forecasting the fair price one second from now, five seconds, five minutes, five hours, 15 hours,” Kacena said. “To have the best fair price, you need to have the best methodologies, the best data, and a lot of assets so that you have real-time data.”
At the company everything is based on their low-latency trading software called Sophon, after the name of a super computer in the science-fiction book Three Body Problem. Copies of the book can be found on the shelves lining the firm’s Prague office.
The platform is the company’s crown jewel and was developed by Kacena’s two co-founders that he met through a childhood friend. Jaromir Satanek and Petr Postulka were developing algorithmic trading platforms for hedge funds and banks at the time. He convinced them that it would be better to use their trading system themselves instead of selling it.
The traders need to be able to understand the models and code. To find candidates with these skills, the company ran a 24-hour recruitment hackathon in November with a sci-fi flavour. Set in a fictional world of “cosmic energy infrastructure,” the challenge required participants to design a high-performance backend trading system under intense time pressure.
In five years, Second Foundation has spread out to 28 markets. On some days, the firm handles nearly 30% of all volumes on Europe’s short-term power market. In the US, where Second Foundation began trading in 2024, the company already ranks among the top three short-term traders in the states where it operates.
Second Foundation’s net profit was €110 million in 2024, with roughly €150 million expected for 2025. The company’s P&L, which shows the total trading result after adding up all gains and subtracting losses, grows 30 to 50% per year, said the CEO Kacena.
“With this growth, Second Foundation outperformed intraday power market growth of around 20% in 2025 compared with 2024,” said Marc Zimmerlin, consultant at Oliver Wyman. “While some Danish trading firms recorded larger gains in individual years, this pace of P&L growth shows the company is catching up rapidly with established peers.”
Salaries are competitive for the region and the firm has to try to retain talent with hedge funds frequently seeking to poach staff. What attracts and keeps people at Second Foundation is the culture. Every week colleagues bring new maths problems that they have found during the weekend and the first hours on Monday are spent trying to solve them.
“The atmosphere is fairly relaxed. You can talk to anybody,” quantitative researcher Cermak said. “That’s what’s really good about our company. I worked in a corporate environment before – nobody had time for me there.”
Second Foundation’s next big push is into battery storage, with plans for up to five gigawatts of projects. The firm already runs assets in Germany and Japan and is expanding into Romania and Finland. Because these projects are capital-intensive, the company works with co-investors such as insurers, funds and family offices. One of Kacena’s “wild dreams” is to own a nuclear plant.
While many hedge funds developed algo-based trading strategies in other asset classes like equities and used them to expand into energy trading, Second Foundation wants to do it the other way around.
“Champions league for me is equities,” said Kacena. But that would require a better platform, better analytics, more experience, more data, more capital, he said. “You can get really burned if you compete with them without being ready.”
