About Altus Works
Built from the inside.
Shared with institutions.
Altus began as a tool the founder built for his own book — a view of the market he couldn't find anywhere else. It became a firm the moment other practitioners needed the same reading.
The Origin
A gap, noticed from the inside
Altus Works began the way a lot of useful software does — not with a business plan, but with a working problem. After a decade in enterprise software and cloud at Oracle, Amazon, and AWS, the founder became a serious derivatives trader on the side. Institutional risk tools are genuinely good at what they do: they tell you with precision how much exposure you carry and how it decomposes. That is an essential discipline.
But a second question mattered just as much: what state is the underlying system actually in — how loaded, how close to its limits, right now? Measuring your own exposure could not answer that, and no off‑the‑shelf product seemed to either. Turbulence indices and factor monitors came close, but they measured price and exposure — not the structural state of the market itself.
That gap is the whole reason Altus got built. The founder began experimenting with Self‑Organized Criticality — the branch of statistical physics that studies how systems organise themselves near tipping points. It was developed to explain earthquakes, cascading power failures, and neuronal avalanches; its statistical signatures looked strikingly similar to the structure he saw in options markets around regime stress.
Two years of iterative work followed — reading the research, building the engine, running it alongside live markets, validating it out of sample. Sharing it with other institutional practitioners became the natural next step. Altus Works Pte. Ltd. was incorporated in Singapore in 2026, and the Altus Terminal is now open to a small early‑access cohort.
- 2024First engine built for the founder's own book
- 2025Out-of-sample validation against live markets
- 2026Altus Works Pte. Ltd. incorporated in Singapore
- 2026Altus Terminal opens to early-access cohort
Founder & CEO
Gunjeet Singh Mahal
A decade across software engineering, P&L management, and enterprise business development. At AWS he was a Senior Business Development Manager for Industry Solutions across EMEA; earlier he ran consumer‑electronics categories at Amazon EU and built home categories at Amazon India. Before business school, a Software Development Engineer at Oracle Retail.
MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, with an exchange semester at SDA Bocconi, Milan, and a B.Tech in Computer Science from Thapar University. Alongside the enterprise career, an active derivatives participant for more than two years — the experience that shaped the questions Altus was built to answer.
He solo‑built the entire Altus stack: the measurement engine, the options‑derived data pipelines, the out‑of‑sample evaluation framework, the Terminal frontend, and the production infrastructure. The product exists because he needed it first.
Enterprise P&L, production engineering, quantitative research, and direct derivatives experience — in one founder — is unusual. Altus is what happened when it compounded.
Connect on LinkedIn ↗Two Separate Endeavours
Altus Works and Altus Labs
The founder runs two independent entities — a commercial product company and a personal research outlet. They share a founder and an intellectual neighbourhood, but they are different projects with different purposes.
The Commercial Product
Altus Works Pte. Ltd.
Singapore
A Singapore technology company with a narrow focus: Self‑Organized Criticality applied to institutional risk monitoring. The measurement engine, the Terminal, the data pipelines, and all related technology were developed and are owned here.
This is the commercial home of the platform — client relationships, the roadmap, and engineering.
A Personal Research Outlet
Altus Labs Ltd.
London
An independent research site where the founder writes on ergodicity and convexity, the architecture of the financial system, debt cycles, and the philosophy of long‑term compounding.
The Approach
Physics, applied carefully
The engine rests on well‑established complex‑systems research — the novelty is in how the ideas are brought together and tuned for markets. It reads the options‑implied surface, not just realised price; it treats fragility as a measurable property; and it documents its own failure modes rather than hiding them.
“In the critical state, the sandpile is the functional unit, not the single grains of sand.”
That is the discipline of the engine. The slope of the pile can be measured, even though the timing of the next avalanche cannot — it measures the slope, and makes no claim to name the grain.
The theoretical foundations are public, and we're glad to talk them through. The measurement engine built on top is proprietary — see the method overview on the home page, and the broader essays at Altus Labs.
Early Access · By Invitation
Join the early-access programme
We are onboarding a small group of institutional risk practitioners — thirty days of full Terminal access, direct founder engagement, no commitment. If you run a convexity or tail‑risk book, a dispersion desk, or an allocation programme, we'd welcome a conversation.