Martin Kou is a co-founder and the CTO of CoinAlpha, the company behind Hummingbot, an open-source framework created for building cryptocurrency trading strategies and bots. ^[1][2]

Education

From 2004 to 2007, Martin studied at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where he pursued a degree in Computer Engineering and Computer Science. During his time at the university, Martin actively participated as the Academic Secretary of CPEGSS from 2004 to 2005, contributing to the student community. ^[2]

Career

Martin started his career as a Core JavaScript Developer at CKSource, where he served as a core developer for FCKeditor 2.5 to CKEditor 3.0. During his time there from June 2007 to August 2009, he was responsible for a wide range of work, including coding, reviewing patches from the community, and serving as a liaison between the community and corporate customers. ^[3]

Following his role at CKSource, Martin Kou co-founded Think Bulbs Ltd. in September 2008. As the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, he created and developed products such as Puri! and SayCheeze. Martin was involved in conception to design, artist contracting, hiring, and coding. The company gained more than 1 million unique iPhone users worldwide, and Martin had the opportunity to speak on behalf of the company in Hong Kong's newspapers, TV, computer magazines, conferences, and universities. In January 2011, Think Bulbs Ltd. was acquired. ^[3]

Afterward, Martin co-founded TixxMe, in January 2011. As the Co-Founder and Director, he overlooked strategy development, product design, interviews, training, software architecture, system administration, and coding. He also contributed to several open-source projects, such as bson codec in Python and bson-objc. Despite being offered a chance to sell the startup for a significant sum, Martin chose to reject the offer. ^[3][4]

In August 2011, Martin joined Apple Inc. as a Senior Software Engineer. He became part of the Apps and Productivity Team based in Cupertino. During his tenure, he was responsible for advanced technology and prototype projects. Additionally, he mentored an engineering intern in collaboration with the Siri team. Martin made contributed to the iWork suite of apps (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) by working on collaborative editing and a web-based version. His achievements were showcased in various Apple events, including the 2013 WWDC "iWork for iCloud" introduction and the 2016 Apple Special Event "Real-time Collaboration." ^[3][4]

Leaving Apple, Martin Kou took on the role of Fund Manager at CoinAlpha Falcon LP from November 2017 to September 2018. Martin created an automated momentum and mean reversal trading strategy for Bitcoin and Ethereum, utilizing machine learning algorithms. ^[3]

Martin found his current position as the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at CoinAlpha, Inc., a venture-backed company behind Hummingbot since July 2017. He has been developing Hummingbot and working at CoinAlpha, focusing on creating market-making and liquidity solutions for digital assets. ^[3][4]

“Our other friend Martin, who had previously founded another startup, was working at Apple as a machine learning engineer. But his passion was trading Bitcoin, so in his spare time, he applied his engineering and machine learning experience to building a bot that would try to predict where the price of Bitcoin and Ether would go and automatically execute trades based on that.” - Michael Feng