Thought Machine, the cloud native core banking technology firm, has raised $83m to fund its global expansion plans and strengthen its services.
Former Google engineer Paul Taylor (pictured) founded Thought Machine in 2014 with the ambition to transform banking by deploying modern cloud-native systems.
Since then, the company’s cloud-based banking solution has empowered banks like Lloyds Banking Group, Standard Chartered, SEB and Atom Bank to compete in the cloud-native era. “For the past six years, our purpose has been to offer banks a next-generation solution to liberate them from legacy systems which plague the financial services industry,” said Taylor. “This funding round comes at a pivotal stage in the company’s growth.”
Thought Machine is now eyeing the opportunity to scale its reach across the world. It announced an expansion into the Asia Pacific last year and will launch in North America later in 2020.
“Thought Machine’s revenues are very healthy as we see cloud native banking become the most common desired target architecture for the world’s banks,” continued Taylor. “The customer demand is huge and this investment allows us to grow rapidly enough to serve all our target markets.
“As well as international expansion, we will put further investment into our core technology, ensuring that banks will always have the best possible cloud native platform and allow them to keep up with technology breakthroughs in the future which bring agility, security, resilience and good economics.”
Draper Esprit, the venture capital firm that has previously invested in challenger banks Revolut and N26, contributed to Thought Machine’s Series B round. “We are delighted to be partnering with Thought Machine in this phase of their growth” said Vinoth Jayakumar, investment director at Draper Esprit. “Our investments in Revolut and N26 demonstrate how banking is undergoing a once in a generation transformation in the technology it uses and the benefit it confers to the customers of the bank. We continue to invest in our thesis of the technology layer that forms the backbone of banking.
“Thought Machine stands out by way of the strength of its engineering capability and is unique in being the only company in the banking technology space that has developed a platform capable of hosting and migrating international Tier 1 banks. This allows innovative banks to expand beyond digital retail propositions to being able to run every function and type of financial transaction in the cloud.”
Existing investors Lloyds Banking Group, IQ Capital, Backed and Playfair Capital also participated in the raise.
Max Bautin, founding partner of IQ Capital, said, “We first backed Thought Machine at seed stage in 2016 and have seen it grow from a startup to a 300-person strong global scaleup with a global customer base and potential to become one of the most valuable European FinTech companies. I am delighted to continue to support Paul and the team on this journey, with an additional £15m investment from our £100m Growth Fund, aimed at our venture portfolio outperformers.”
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