KDB-X (kdb+ time-series and vector engine)

KX Software Limited is headquartered in Newry, Northern Ireland, employs more than 600 people across Europe, North America and Asia Pacific, and has worked on kdb+ for over three decades. It became a standalone software company in March 2025 after its former parent FD Technologies sold First Derivative, and serves investment banks, hedge funds, aerospace and defense and high-tech manufacturing firms that must analyze very large, fast-moving time-series data.

KDB-X is the next generation of the kdb+ engine, combining columnar time-series storage, native vector search and NVIDIA GPU acceleration in one runtime with Python, SQL, q and REST interfaces. It reads Apache Parquet natively, exposes natural language querying through an MCP server and runs on-premises or in the cloud, alongside kdb Insights, the KDB.AI vector database, OneTick market data and trade surveillance products. Customers shown include JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Citadel, RBC, BlackRock and TD Securities.

• Unified engine: Time-series, vector and GPU compute in one runtime for real-time AI.
• Multi-language access: Query with Python, SQL, q or REST.
• GPU acceleration: NVIDIA GPU support for time-series analytics and model scoring.
• Vector search and MCP: Native vector search plus an MCP server for natural language querying by AI agents.
• Parquet-native storage: Reads Apache Parquet directly alongside kdb+ columnar data.
• Flexible deployment: Runs on-premises or in the cloud, with a free Community Edition.

A Vietnamese securities company can store full tick history and run backtests and real-time risk checks for algorithmic trading on one engine. An exchange or broker can build trade surveillance with prebuilt scenarios to detect spoofing or insider patterns. A manufacturer can analyze high-frequency sensor data from production lines to spot anomalies early.

Trading and risk teams can query tick-level history and live streams in one engine, with a single client processing over 1 trillion records per day according to the site. GPU acceleration delivers 10x to 25x gains on joins, aggregations and model scoring, per the April 2026 announcement. A free Community Edition usable commercially lowers the entry barrier, and 75+ prebuilt surveillance scenarios help firms meet market abuse rules.

Capital markets firms are adding AI models, quant research and agents on top of rapidly growing market data, which strains fragmented data stacks. In Southeast Asia, growing retail trading volumes, algorithmic trading and stricter market surveillance expectations are raising demand for real-time time-series analytics at brokers, exchanges and asset managers.

KX Software Limited is headquartered at Brian Conlon House, Newry, Northern Ireland, with more than 600 employees and APAC and ANZ offices. It became an independent software company in March 2025 after FD Technologies sold First Derivative, is led by CEO Ashok Reddy and partners with NVIDIA, Microsoft and AWS.