Itoflow, the London-based AI platform helping professional investment teams scale portfolio research and management, has secured $2.5m in pre-seed funding.
The round was led by Balderton Capital, with participation from a group of angel investors including Cleo founder and CEO Barney Hussey-Yeo. Itoflow said the fresh capital would be used to grow its engineering and quantitative research teams, speed up product development and support its commercial and regulatory efforts.
Set up in 2026, Itoflow is developing AI agents that absorb how individual investment firms approach research, risk management and portfolio reviews. Rather than pushing a fixed investment philosophy, the platform converts each team’s existing methodology into governed, repeatable workflows capable of running continuously across asset classes such as equities, bonds, ETFs, commodities and digital assets, spanning global markets.
Because its agentic infrastructure was built in-house, the firm says it has closer oversight of the security and dependability of agents designed to keep operating for months or years as conditions shift.
Itoflow was founded by three graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology who bring together experience from leading finance and technology firms. Co-founder and chief executive Aditya Jha worked as a quantitative researcher for nine years at JPMorgan, RBC and, most recently, Tower Research Capital, where he led the mid-frequency trading business. His fellow founders have built large-scale infrastructure at Apple, Google and Microsoft and also carry quantitative research backgrounds from JPMorgan.
In pilots currently under way, investment teams describe in plain English the strategy, risk limits and review standards they want applied. Itoflow’s agents then use that guidance to run quantitative research and backtesting, keep portfolios under constant watch and flag material changes along with the evidence behind them. The aim is to let teams cover more investments, track more portfolios and apply their processes more consistently without having to substantially expand their quantitative research headcount.
Customers keep authority over how the system behaves, including deciding which actions and thresholds require sign-off from a person. Institutional clients also have the option of running Itoflow inside their own infrastructure, keeping sensitive data and proprietary strategies within their own environment. The company is currently piloting its technology with a number of hedge funds and family offices worldwide and is in discussions with exchanges, brokerages and financial-data providers.
Itoflow co-founder and CEO Aditya Jha said, “Our long-term research goal is to build self-improving investment agents. As an agent supports a mandate over months and years, it should learn which approaches continue to hold up, identify promising new signals and recognise when an apparent edge has decayed. Within the parameters set by each investment team, these agents could become a powerful tool for continuous discovery.”
Balderton Capital principal Sivesh Sukumar said, “The most sophisticated investment firms spend years building the systems and research teams needed to test ideas, manage risk and respond as markets change. Aditya and the team are changing the economics of that model, giving many more investment firms access to systematic capabilities that were previously too expensive and complex to build. They combine a rare depth of quantitative trading experience with the technical ability to deliver it at scale.”
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