Doom sun. That’s the shade of apocalyptic deep red that the sun becomes in times of acute air pollution. In recent years, the doom sun has been seen across the country because of intense wildfires belching smoke across North America.
As the climate changes globally, extreme weather events like wildfires are becoming more common — including in Nebraska. As a result, the doom sun has become a regular omen of environmental damage.
But in Lincoln, one fintech startup hopes to, in its own small way, mitigate that damage.
Borrowing the name (and color), Doomsun is creating algorithmic trading tools to predict, test and deliver investment returns in volatile financial markets. The ultimate goal is to make money on the energy industry’s transition to renewable power.
Making it easier to get financial returns from solar, battery and wind companies — so the thinking goes — can entice more investment into renewables. As a result of phasing out fossil fuel and its pollution, investors may also help reduce the effects of climate change.
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Doomsun CEO and co-founder Joe Smith presents about the startup to the Lincoln Partnership for Economic Development. Doomsun is a recipient of an LPED 2026 LaunchLNK grant of $20,000 in non-dilutive funding.
“There are people out there that feel like me and want to see that (renewables transition) succeed and want to see it happen faster, and there are people that are going to continue to bet against it,” said Joe Smith, the CEO and co-founder of Doomsun. “I want my side to have the sharper tools and be able to make money in those markets.”
It will likely take several years to reach that goal. Fintech is a challenging industry for new companies as they deal with finance and security regulations while also developing their products. Smith also doesn’t see much appetite in Nebraska for the long-term investment needed for fintech companies to get off the ground.
For now, Doomsun is bootstrapped with personal money and a little under $300,000 in angel funding. The startup is also a recipient of a 2026 LaunchLNK grant of $20,000 in non-dilutive funding.
And though it is fueled by environmentalist goals, the startup’s trading tools are market agnostic to sell across the finance world.
“We have investors that want to see us make good on that long-term goal of impactful investing in the energy transition space,” Smith said. “But to get there, we need to generate revenue. We need these (trading) tools to do it anyway. So we're going to build the sharp tools.”
For the love of engineering
Doomsun co-founders Smith and Daemian Mack, the company’s CTO who lives in North Carolina, have worked together over the past 11 years at a variety of fintech companies, including Nubank, a global digital bank based in Brazil.
They had often talked about creating their own startup for algorithmic financial trading. Smith developed an interest after experimenting with automated trading during the 2017 cryptocurrency boom and working on the tech infrastructure for hedge funds and investment banks.
“We specialize in distributed systems development,” Smith said. “Which is a fancy way of saying when you have a whole bunch of separate (computer) systems that need to communicate, usually over a network, and have very complex interactions, there are a whole host of things you need to consider” — such as security, speed of communication and preventing errors.
Smith and Mack think of financial markets in a similar way. Markets are always changing based on stock prices, investor sentiment, interest rates and company earnings, among other “systems.” As they see it, understanding those complex interactions, figuring out the best investment strategy and automating it is mostly an engineering issue.
Doomsun CEO and co-founder Joe Smith presents about the startup at 1 Million Cups in Lincoln.
In 2024, Smith and Mack finally took the plunge and founded Doomsun. In a way, the company is split in two: Doomsun is developing trading and market intelligence tools using artificial intelligence, which are then tested using a real fund of Smith and Mack’s personal money.
That means the founders have real skin in the game for their products. It also serves as an extra adrenaline kick.
If their tools work, the fund will be flush with money — and if not, then Smith and Mack’s account will be bathed in its own shade of doom sun red. (All investor funding goes to support Doomsun’s development, not the test fund.)
Another fun factor is being able to play in the wide-open space of financial markets. Despite there being many algorithmic trading companies and tools, Doomsun has little sense of competition given the complexity of financial markets.
“It sounds to the uninitiated that you are competing directly with people who, when they win, you lose, and when you win, they lose,” Mack said. “But there are so many variables at play that there is just this gigantic space. So it's sort of infinitely malleable. It's an infinite target-rich environment for various strategies.”
Turbulence and profit
For the moment, Doomsun has two products. Nova is the trading platform designed to autonomously analyze markets, prototype investment strategies and, once deployed, to monitor actual investments to learn whether the strategy was successful.
Artificial intelligence is used on the back end to help Nova learn and evolve. In the future, AI may also be a bridge that helps Nova cheaply integrate with other software and make it more appealing as an enterprise product.
Daylight is the more stand-alone market analysis tool. “We have as advisers a few people that have been in industry, so they're our first target for, ‘Hey, does this work for you?’” Smith said. “We're working closely with them, validating that these are the tools that they would want.”
Focusing on the energy market helps develop Doomsun’s tools. If they can be successful in predicting and making money from such a volatile market, they can be used anywhere and sold to any customer.
Once those tools are ready, Doomsun hopes to work with investment funds and companies to lower the barrier to entry for investment in renewable energy. That can be through selling Doomsun’s tools or by offering investments in Doomsun’s own fund management.
“It's mostly the fund in the future that gives us an opportunity to do impact investing,” Mack said. “The reason that works is because … effectively, buying a company stock gives it money to do more good things, or selling its stock takes away money from its treasuries.”
For Smith, the impact of Doomsun is just as much about increasing investment in renewables as it is decreasing funding for fossil fuels. And now is an especially good time to get involved, as the AI and data center rush has increased the need for new generation — much of which is in the form of solar, battery and wind.
“This transition is going to happen, regardless,” Smith said. “Whether it happens fast enough to really deal with the worst of climate change is increasingly fraught, but we're going to try.”
