FOUNDER & CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER
Frank M. Smith
Frank M. Smith is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of ONG Trades, Inc. He leads company strategy, capital formation, key partnerships, regulatory engagement, and corporate governance — and he is a hands-on technical founder: he personally architected the Company's infrastructure and personally executed the platform's migration to fully managed AWS.
He brings more than three decades of experience across energy development, physical fuel trading, corporate finance, technology, and company building — including founding, leading, and exiting operating companies, and energy projects in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Why ONG Trades Exists
ONG Trades grew directly out of Mr. Smith's work at FMSBW, LLC, a Texas refined-fuels intermediary he founded that bridges buyers and suppliers in the global physical energy market — sourcing across a portfolio of suppliers representing more than 125 refined fuel products, with FOB deliveries from hubs including Houston, Rotterdam, Fujairah, Jurong, Ningbo-Zhoushan, and Qingdao, and CIF delivery to any safe world port.
Operating at the center of physical fuel trading, he experienced the market's core frictions firsthand: opaque pricing, counterparty and documentation risk, sanctions exposure, and slow, manual, trust-by-handshake deal execution. ONG Trades is his response — a compliance-first marketplace that performs, at transaction speed, the verification and matching an experienced intermediary does by hand.
Selected Experience
Energy
Physical refined-fuels trading through FMSBW. Lead developer of a major solar and battery-storage project in ERCOT. President & CEO of Sologen Systems, a commercial solar developer that sold more than one million watts of installations. Led development of geothermal electricity production from depleted oil and gas wells under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with NREL and the Department of Energy, with university partners across Texas.
Corporate finance & company building
Founder and Managing Partner of Cumulative Consulting, advising growth companies on mergers, acquisitions, corporate financings, and public-market initiatives. Led negotiation of a $100 million hospital acquisition out of bankruptcy. Built a direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical marketing company to $6M in revenue in 18 months; the company was later sold. Earlier career in managed care, contracting, and network development, including at The Prudential Insurance Company.
Technology & applied AI
Led development of an AI and natural-language graph-database system for cataloging and searching the Medline medical literature library of more than 24 million articles — early applied-AI work that prefigures the multi-agent architecture at the core of the ONG Trades platform. Personally developed ONG Trades' infrastructure and executed its migration to AWS, including the platform's security-hardening program.
Talk to us
Reach Frank and the team at investors@ongtrades.com, or see the vision and participation requirements.