Headquartered in London, Thought Machine is a fintech that sells cloud-based b2b banking services. The company just announced that it has bagged $200 million in a Series C funding round, which has taken its valuation to over $1 billion, thereby attaining the unicorn status.
The investment round was led by US-based Nyca Partners along with other investors such as JPMorgan Chase Strategic Investments, ING Ventures, and Standard Chartered Ventures. These are the investment arms of some of Thought Machine’s tier-one banking clients in the world.
Even the existing investor – Lloyd’s Banking Group, which participated in the Series A round of the company invested in this round. The other existing investors include Eurazeo, British Patient Capital, Molten Ventures (Draper Espirit formerly), IQ Capital, Backed, and SEB participated in the round.
Focuses on international growth
The London fintech announced that it will use the investment to continue the development, as well as, expansion of its SaaS-based flagship product called Vault and its Universal Product Engine. It will allow for unparalleled flexibility in product configuration and development. Also, it will focus on expanding its international presence, targeting new key markets, and strengthening its global offices. This way, it intends to accelerate the adoption of cloud-native core banking technology globally.
Cloud-native core banking technology
Founded by Paul Taylor, a former Google engineer in 2014, Thought Machine works with the mission to let banks deploy modern systems and navigate from the legacy IT platforms that are plaguing the banking industry. The company does this with Vault, its cloud-native core banking platform.
Currently, Thought Machine has over 500 employees (added more than 200 employees last year). It also relocated into a bigger London HQ in October 2021 to accommodate the increase in its headcount. The company has global offices in Melbourne, Sydney, New York and Singapore apart from London.
Highly scalable and flexible solution!
Thought Machine offers next-generation of cloud-native core platforms, thereby becoming the top choice for premium banks eyeing to upgrade their core architecture. Its flagship product – Vault is highly flexible, scalable, and configurable and designed for complex requirements and environments for tier one banks. The next-generation cloud-based core-banking engine is built around APIs using a microservice architecture.
Vault’s services constitute a major portion of all capabilities that are needed to run a bank. Further services offered by banks and other vendors can connect via Vault’s APIs to provide a seamless and frictionless banking experience to users.
Notably, Vault’s architecture is suitable to run any type of bank. Particularly, it is focused on building small business and retail capabilities. Vault can be configured to run any retail bank product, irrespective of the complexity. It includes key products of retail banks such as savings, loans, mortgages, credit cards and current accounts.
It uses a system of Smart Contracts that are hosted on a cloud service of the customers who choose amidst Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, and Amazon Web Services. Vault does this by minimising running costs and maintaining the legacy technology.
Single software solution
Thought Machine provides a single software solution, which banks configure any product, operating model, user experience or data analysis capability. It does this by deploying Vault as a single platform to all clients and providing the necessary configuration. The configuration layer provides workflows, Smart Contracts, data analytics and reporting.
