- Itoflow has attracted $2.5 million in pre-seed funding, with Balderton Capital as the lead investor, to help investment firms manage portfolios using AI.
- Aditya Jha was in charge of mid-frequency trading at Tower Research Capital before setting up this platform.
- The startup is already running three pilots, including one monitoring roughly $3 billion in assets.
The most advanced hedge funds spend many years and tens of millions of dollars developing systems that enable them to conduct research, testing, and monitoring of investment strategies on a large scale.
Aditya Jha spent nine years in that system and, up to now, held the position of Business Head in charge of Mid-Frequency Trading at Tower Research Capital, after which he concluded that most investment firms will never have the opportunity to set up their own such system.
The London-based startup Itoflow, which he co-founded to bridge that gap, has secured $2.5 million in pre-seed funding, with Balderton Capital as the lead investor, alongside other angel investors such as Barney Hussey-Yeo, founder of Cleo.
“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,” Jha said.
In 2025, the market for AI in asset management was valued at $3.8 billion and is projected to grow by about 27.7% per year through 2034 as companies choose to automate their research, compliance, and portfolio monitoring rather than hire additional staff.
The sector’s rapid growth is attracting well-funded competitors, but Jha believes his trading experience will enable Itoflow to get ahead of the others before they catch up.
From trading floor experience to product innovation
Before joining Tower Research, Jha had a career as a quantitative researcher at JPMorgan and RBC. What stayed with him was how long it took even Tower Research to get a new team running.
“One thing that struck me at Tower was how long it could still take a new team to become fully productive. Depending on the strategy, it could take six to eighteen months to assemble the data, research pipelines, backtesting, monitoring and execution infrastructure they needed. And this was at one of the most sophisticated quantitative firms in the world. It made me realise that the barrier for smaller firms often isn’t a lack of investment ideas, but the infrastructure and specialist talent required before you can even place your first trades. That was a big part of the insight behind Itoflow: can we compress that six-to-eighteen-month build-out into a platform that gives investment teams those capabilities much faster?” he tells Tech Funding News.
He founded Itoflow in 2026 together with Abinash Meher and Dibya Jyoti Roy, engineers who had built large-scale infrastructure at Apple, Google, and Microsoft.
The company adopts the investment firm’s own method, explained in simple English, covering matters such as strategy, risk limits, and review criteria, thereby making this a repeatable and properly governed process.
The agents conduct quantitative research and backtesting, monitor portfolios in real time across stocks, bonds, ETFs, commodities, and digital assets, and highlight any significant changes with supporting evidence. Itoflow has developed its agent infrastructure from scratch, and the company states that this enables greater control over security and reliability as market conditions evolve.
Clients can decide which actions require human approval, and institutional customers can run the platform on their own systems to keep their strategies confidential.
A crowded field, but a more focused pitch
Other companies are also involved in this area. Boosted.ai, a Toronto-based platform that has raised $61 million to date, provides a similar assistant for generating ideas and monitoring a portfolio. Danelfin employs machine learning to evaluate individual stocks according to their probability of outperforming the market. Composer enables retail investors to create and test their own strategies using a no-code editor.
No one else achieves what Itoflow says they do: encoding a company’s own processes rather than being given a ready-made one, across a broader range of assets, including not just stocks and bonds but also digital assets. It’s another matter whether that difference is important to a hedge fund’s compliance team.
Itoflow is currently running three pilots — with an asset manager, an ETF provider and a mid-size hedge fund — the largest of which has roughly $3 billion in assets under ItoFlow’s monitoring, Jha tells TFN. The company has also picked up more than 260 sign-ups on its platform, though its near-term focus is on converting the enterprise pipeline behind those three pilots rather than the self-serve side.
Sivesh Sukumar, a principal at Balderton Capital, added, “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.”
Hussey-Yeo, who, together with others, took part in Wassist’s WhatsApp commerce funding round early this year and has helped grow Cleo to $280 million in annual recurring revenue, pointed out the appeal of Itoflow in terms of keeping users in control.
“Building Cleo has taught me that financial AI only works when it’s intuitive, trustworthy and keeps people in control. Itoflow gets that. It gives investment teams sophisticated tools without asking them to give up their own process or judgment. I’m excited to back Aditya and the team,” he said.
What’s next
The $2.5 million pre-seed is Itoflow’s first disclosed funding round. Itoflow currently has three co-founders, one employee, and two consultants, and Jha says the majority of the new funding will go toward hiring researchers and engineers. The rest will support product development and the regulatory and commercial work needed as the company moves beyond its current pilots and ongoing talks with exchanges, brokerages, and financial data providers.
The pitch is that a small team can compress what took Tower Research and its peers decades and billions to build into a set of plain-English instructions. That is either the whole point of AI agents or the exact place they tend to fall apart — nobody really knows yet what governed autonomy looks like once a portfolio is bleeding money at two in the morning, and the human who’s supposed to sign off is asleep.
