Draper Esprit leads $83m funding round in Thought Machine
Technology company Thought Machine has raised $83m (£64.74m) in series B funding led by Draper Esprit.
The venture capital firm, which has invested in a number of fintech businesses, contributed £26.5m to the funding for Thought Machine, a technology company that builds cloud-native technology for banks.
Thought Machine’s banking platform, Vault, counts Lloyds Banking Group, Standard Chartered, SEB and Atom Bank as clients.
Draper Esprit has previously invested in challenger banks Revolut and N26. Investment director Vinoth Jayakumar said: “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.”
All of Thought Machine’s existing investors – Lloyds Banking Group, IQ Capital, Backed and Playfair Capital – participated in this round.
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IQ Capital contributed £15m from their new scale-up fund. Max Bautin, founding partner of the firm, said: “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.”
The technology firm said that the funding will be used to drive its expansion into the Asia Pacific region.
Last year it announced the opening of Thought Machine Singapore, which covers sales and marketing. It also plans to launch in Australia and Japan, and is looking to launch in North America later this year.
Thought Machine’s founder and chief executive Paul Taylor said: “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”.