Luke Merrick, a senior at the University of Virginia, sings in the glee club and recently spent a summer in Japan. His latest hobby? High-frequency trading.

The 22-year-old engineering student is among the first users of Alpha Trading Labs, a startup looking to bring ultrafast stock trading to the masses. The company says it has built technology similar to that used by industry giants Citadel Securities LLC and Virtu Financial Inc., which trade tens of billions of dollars of shares each day.

Although high-speed trading firms typically keep their technology a secret, Alpha Trading Labs is throwing its system wide open, with a programming tool kit that anyone can use to access high-powered trading machines.

The company, which launched its do-it-yourself platform in January, has invited anyone with a trading idea and coding skills to try it out. Those who craft successful algorithms can get a chance to run them and share profits with Alpha Trading Labs, whose owners have up to $100 million to allocate to crowdsourced trading strategies.

It is an unorthodox approach at a time when the high-frequency trading, or HFT, business has been struggling due to a multiyear slump in volatility. HFT firms’ revenue from U.S. stock trading was an estimated $850 million last year, down from $7.2 billion in 2009, according to research firm Tabb Group. Even though volatility has picked up in 2018, helping to lift traders’ profits, the industry has become much more consolidated.