FundGuard, a company that has developed a cloud-based investments fund operating system powered by artificial intelligence, announced that it has raised $4 million in funding led by Blumberg Capital and LionBird. And FundGuard will use the funding to accelerate the development of its platform and the Contingency NAV product. And FundGuard is planning to bring operational efficiencies afforded by artificial intelligence and cloud technologies to market.
What does FundGuard do? FundGuard enables asset managers and custodian banks to easier manage investments across pensions, ETFs, mutual funds, and insurance. With machine learning and artificial intelligence, FundGuard is able to identify unstructured financial and operational issues to avoid potential fraud. And FundGuard’s platform provides real-time support for providing insights and recommendations to customers.
“With continued pressure on management fees driven by the proliferation of ETFs, robo-advisors, ‘zero fee’ offerings, and frequently changing regulations, the industry is clearly now in need of an operating system that’s highly accurate across all asset classes and efficient to operate,” said FundGuard CEO and co-founder Lior Yogev. “Our SaaS platform is built to meet the needs of today’s investment industry, designed to support sophisticated trading environments and new technologies such as distributed ledgers. Users will find a modern UX, APIs, plus workflow and collaboration tools that will add tremendous value to their companies and keep them ahead of the competition.”
One of the biggest challenges with the stock market industry is that older technology is often used for handling transactions volumes and it can barely support the volumes needed for real-time positions. And the outdated technology is unable to keep up with new regulatory requirements and tax changes.
The Contingency and Oversight NAV product also provides daily-resetting and a fully automated operating system at a secondary independent location to enable asset managers to handle their fiduciary responsibility for business continuity and protect their funds’ most critical data even during system failures and cyber attacks.
“We are excited to join forces with Lior and the FundGuard team as they work to make this huge industry digital from the core,” added LionBird Ventures general partner Yuval Ariav. “The company’s unique product vision, at a time of structural and regulatory pressures facing the industry, will transform it to the benefit of investment managers, banks, fund administrators, and ultimately, retail and institutional investors.”
FundGuard was created by Yogev, Yaniv Zecharya, and Uri Katz. The three of them met more than 20 years ago as officers in Israel’s Defense Forces’ Unit 8200. Prior to launching FundGuard, Yogev was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs and previously led Multifonds’ business in North America and was part of the team that sold the company to Temenos for $265 million. Zecharya used to lead the AI R&D efforts at Salesforce following the acquisition of a machine learning sales insights company he co-founded called BlueTail. And Katz worked for several years in the financial technology industry involving enterprise cloud systems.
