NJIT Alumni Jordan Hu and Dieter Weissenrieder Honored at NJ Immigrant Entrepreneur Awards
The 11th Annual New Jersey Immigrant Entrepreneur Awards, held on June 25 at the Pines Manor in Edison, New Jersey, celebrated the remarkable achievements of immigrant business leaders who have significantly contributed to New Jersey’s economy. Among the distinguished honorees were two exceptional alumni from New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT): Jordan Hu ’89 and Dieter Weissenrieder ’76.
Jordan Hu: Immigrant Entrepreneur of the Year
Jordan Hu, Founder and CEO of RiskVal Financial Solutions, LLC, was recognized as the Immigrant Entrepreneur of the Year. Originally hailing from Taiwan, Hu came to the United States with a degree in applied mathematics from National Tsing Hua University and later earned a master’s degree in computer science from NJIT. After a successful career on Wall Street, Hu founded RiskVal in 2001.
RiskVal’s story began in 1998, when Hu spent three years building up a team for their first client, Credit Suisse, to create a customized, next-generation fixed-income trading platform for them. Building this solution laid the groundwork for RiskVal as a company.
In 2001, they decided that the time was right to establish RiskVal as a completely self-funded start-up company with a main office in New York City and fewer than 10 employees. Hu was determined to bring together talents from Wall Street and academia to create a front-office trading solution pioneering the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. In the same year, they announced their first product, a fixed income pre-trade analytics solution called RiskVal Relative Value Fixed-Income (RVFI). It was a revolution in the financial market, because at that time most firms were still trying to build in-house solutions, which is a very costly and time-consuming practice for any financial company.
Hu’s first endorsement came from Cargill, one of the largest private companies in North America. As Cargill’s success story spread around the industry, many banks and fund managers became interested in RiskVal, and brought the solution to their trading desk as a supplement to their existing trading strategies. Over time, RiskVal built up around 200+ different trading strategies along with 15+ years of high-quality historical data for the global fixed-income market, such that traders can use it to do more than just validate the live market, making RVFI the only off-the-shelf trading analytics solution. Both buy-side and sell-side traders started to recognize RVFI as an irreplaceable solution to their desks. By 2005, RiskVal expanded its solution to cover the credit market. The company has since grown into a multimillion-dollar enterprise, employing 60 people and providing critical products to trading desks at Tier 1 banks and hedge funds across the globe.
Dieter Weissenrieder: Lifetime Achievement Award
Dieter Weissenrieder, co-founder and CEO of the Weiss-Aug Group, was honored with the Immigrant Entrepreneur Lifetime Achievement Award. Weissenrieder emigrated from Germany in 1960 as a tool and die maker to work for his uncle’s tooling business. He quickly became the manager of the company, and after working for the family business for 10 years, the company was sold to a large firm.
With his partner Kurt Augustin, he then founded the Weiss-Aug Group in 1972 while pursuing an industrial engineering degree at NJIT, and took a small, four-person precision contract metal stamping company into a multimillion-dollar enterprise with six locations and 700 employees. His entrepreneurial vision and philanthropic efforts have left a lasting impact on both the industry and the community. He has been a trailblazer in precision metal stamping, injection molding, value-added assembly solutions and tooling, serving a wide range of industries, including medical devices, automotive, and industrial sectors.
In 2021, the Weissenrieder family provided NJIT with a new engineering lab to give students hands-on expertise in machining, process automation, process control inspection and quality control. At its center is a small-scale automated manufacturing system capable of converting raw materials into finished and inspected parts. The indispensable opportunity to experience a small-scale version of a factory floor right here on campus is at the heart of NJIT’s experiential learning philosophy.
The NJIT community proudly celebrates the achievements of Jordan Hu and Dieter Weissenrieder. Their recognition at the NJ Immigrant Entrepreneur Awards highlights the significant contributions of NJIT alumni to the business world and their influential roles in New Jersey’s economic landscape.
