Banking Provider Service Thought Machine Raises $83 Million In Funding

By Amit Chowdhry ● Mar 2, 2020
  • Banking provider service Thought Machine announced it raised $83 million in Series B funding

Thought Machine — a banking provider service launched in 2014 by former Google engineer Paul Taylor — announced it raised $83 million in Series B funding led by Draper Espirt with participation from existing investors Lloyds Banking Group, IQ Capital, Backed, and Playfair Capital.

The core product offered by Though Machine is called Vault, which is based entirely on the cloud. And some of the company’s customers include Lloyds Banking, Standard Chartered, and Atom Bank.

This funding round will be used for supporting system development and driving the company’s plans for expansion into Australia and Japan. Plus the company plans to expand into the U.S. as well.

Key Quotes:

“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. This funding round comes at a pivotal stage in the company’s growth. 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. 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.”

– Paul Taylor, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Thought Machine

“We are delighted to be partnering with Thought Machine in this phase of their growth. 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.”

– Vinoth Jayakumar, Investment Director at Draper Esprit

“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 £15 million investment from our £100 million Growth Fund, aimed at our venture portfolio outperformers.”

– Max Bautin, Founding Partner of IQ Capital