Artificial intelligence has rapidly become a central part of business planning across a wide-variety of industries, including finance, healthcare, logistics, and national infrastructure. But as the sophistication of AI models continues to improve, one glaring issue remains: the single point of failure for this technology isn’t the model, but the data it relies on.
Data preparation, data debugging, and data quality monitoring are widely considered to be the three primary sources of bottlenecks with data, which results in AI evolving faster than the data systems and controls used to feed models.
Daniel Kornum, better known as DK, founded NakedSignal to solve this problem by bringing the data speed and precision of high-frequency trading into broader AI. With the global data market projected to grow to over $5 trillion, Kornum sees data as the true enabler of the next AI wave, not just models.
Here’s a closer look at the life and career of a systems thinker operating at the intersection of finance, data, and emerging infrastructure.
The founder: a systems thinker with excellent experience in execution
DK’s fascination with systems optimization began at a young age, when he would code bots for online games while still at school.
He managed to get into Cambridge University, where he studied both economics and mathematics, ultimately receiving top marks in corporate finance for his BA and MA. While there, he became a member of the Hawks’ Club, Cambridge’s oldest invitation-only society for scholar-athletes, often likened to America’s Skull and Bones. Known for producing power brokers in British finance and public life, its alumni include prime ministers, military generals, and global dealmakers. DK built early ties with peers who now hold influential roles across finance, government, and policy from London to the Gulf.
DK also thrived in competition, becoming a national champion in the 4×100-meter relay, the world’s #3-ranked StarCraft II player, and breaking two world records in rowing.
DK’s early success came from hard work and resilience, which he humbly attributes to his upbringing by a 15-year-old single mother in Denmark, who would stop at nothing to ensure her son was set up for success.
“She sacrificed everything to put me in the best position possible,” DK recalls. “Even now, with me living abroad, she continues to give up more than I can put into words. Building something significant is my way of making it all worth it.”
The problem: AI is advancing but the data it needs doesn’t exist yet
DK launched his career as a business analyst for McKinsey & Company in London, where he led and co-authored the firm’s flagship European banking productivity study.
During that time, he began building relationships with senior figures inside one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, which now place him within a rare circle of operators trusted with long-term national priorities.
Shortly afterwards, he was recruited by Citadel Securities and named an executive committee member for the company’s Europe branches before he even turned 30, an impressive appointment at one of the most important firms in global finance, giving him a seat at the table where key regulatory, geopolitical, and strategic decisions were shaped.
During his tenure at Citadel, DK led the firm’s Brexit transition strategy across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa as COO — overseeing the seamless migration of trading operations in equities, futures, and options. Citadel completed this transition without any publicly reported trading disruptions, at a time when many financial institutions were preparing for significant operational risk.
It was this project that exposed him to agentic AI and the problem which led him to develop NakedSignal. Thanks to his work with algorithmic trading, DK knew that agentic AI required access to structured and dynamic data in real time, but it took a close call at Citadel to fully understand the business impact.
“I remember walking along London Bridge to work at Citadel when my phone buzzed—one of our main data streams was down. By the time I got to the office, I’d gathered all our top AI and hardware engineers, and by noon, we were back online. In an industry where every hour out of the market meant more than $10 million in missed profits, we couldn’t afford even a minute of downtime.”
Situations like these are resolved behind closed doors, where only a handful of trusted operators quietly make decisions with systemic impact. For DK, it wasn’t the first time he’d been in such a room, and it wouldn’t be the last.
Citadel and DK were lucky that there was an existing infrastructure in place to fix the problem. What DK realized was that, outside of hedge funds, few companies had the resources to set up these real-time data systems, let alone fix them if they failed.
There was a gap that urgently needed filling.
The build: launching NakedSignal to architect the backbone of real-time AI
DK created NakedSignal as an infrastructure company rather than an AI startup. “As the rest of the world starts to truly adopt automation through agentic AI, they will also need access to this real-time data,” he explains.
NakedSignal’s goal isn’t to turn every company into one that operates at nanosecond speed like a hedge fund, at least right away, but to help them evolve from using months-old data to daily, hourly, and potentially real-time information.
To achieve this, NakedSignal aims to provide reliable access to fresh data which can then be used to feed AI systems, essentially bridging the gap in modern data access. Still officially in stealth, NakedSignal’s infrastructure is already being evaluated by top-tier hedge funds and the company is rumoured to be in discussions with a shortlist of government-linked entities tasked with preparing national AI infrastructure.
Looking forward: a $5 trillion future—and the race to power it
Over the course of his career, DK has come to a crucial realization: the data infrastructure market is only in its infancy.
As part of his broader vision, DK is authoring a book published by Hans Reitzels Forlag, an imprint of Gyldendal, Denmark’s largest and oldest publisher. The book presents a new way to turn unstructured data into real-time infrastructure for AI systems operating in high-stakes environments.
From coding bots for games as a child to starting NakedSignal to address inefficiencies with data use in artificial intelligence, DK’s life has revolved around systems optimization, not just how they run, but who controls them.
In an era where AI is becoming a core pillar of national competitiveness and global security, DK is part of a small group of builders shaping the infrastructure that everything else will rely on.
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