Nivaura

About Nivaura

Nivaura is a financial technology company that provides a platform for digitizing and automating the primary issuance and administration of financial instruments. Founded in 2016 by Dr. Avtar Sehra, the company was established to streamline the complex and often manual processes involved in capital markets. Sehra, who has a background in academia and capital markets, identified inefficiencies in bond issuance processes that led to increased risk and costs, envisioning a "one-click" solution for managing the documentation lifecycle.

The company's core technology, Aurora, is a workflow digitization and automation platform. It facilitates the entire lifecycle of issuing securities, including debt, equity, and structured products. A key feature is the General-purpose Legal Mark-up Language (GLML), a human-readable language that allows legal and financial documents to be machine-readable, enabling automation. This system is designed to reduce the time-to-market for financial instruments by up to 80%, thereby lowering costs.

Initially, Nivaura heavily focused on leveraging distributed ledger technology (DLT), executing the first fully automated cryptocurrency-denominated bond in 2017 and later Santander's first end-to-end blockchain bond in 2019. However, the company later broadened its focus to digitizing debt capital markets (DCM) more generally, pivoting from a primary reliance on blockchain. Its solutions are offered as a white-label service to financial institutions like banks and exchanges, which can deploy the platform on-premise or in the cloud. Notable clients and partners have included the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), DBS Bank, Santander, Allen & Overy, and Linklaters. LSEG utilized Nivaura's technology for its own digital primary issuance platform, LSEG Flow.

In August 2021, Scott Eaton, former COO of MarketAxess Europe and CEO of Algomi, was appointed CEO, with founder Avtar Sehra moving to the role of President to focus on innovation. In January 2023, the digital debt market solutions provider NowCM acquired Nivaura's digital and intellectual property assets in a move toward market consolidation. The deal included Nivaura's clients and technology, with NowCM committing to continue supporting platforms like LSEG Flow.