Itoflow, an AI platform for professional investment teams, has raised £1.8 million in pre-seed funding led by Balderton Capital, with participation from angel investors including Cleo founder Barney Hussey-Yeo.
Founded in 2026, Itoflow builds AI agents that learn how each investment firm researches opportunities, manages risk and reviews portfolios. Rather than imposing a particular investment philosophy, the platform turns each team's own approach into governed workflows that can operate continuously across global markets and asset classes, including equities, bonds, ETFs, commodities and digital assets. The agentic infrastructure behind it was built from the ground up, giving Itoflow greater control over the security and reliability of agents designed to operate for months or years as markets change.
In current pilots, investment teams define in plain English the investment approach, risk constraints and review criteria they want Itoflow to apply. Those instructions are used by its AI agents to conduct quantitative research and backtesting, continuously monitor portfolios and surface material changes with supporting evidence. Teams can therefore research and review more investments, monitor more portfolios and apply their processes more consistently without building a significantly larger quantitative research function. Customers retain control over how the technology operates, including setting the actions and thresholds that require human approval, and institutional customers can deploy Itoflow within their own infrastructure so sensitive data and proprietary investment strategies remain in their environment. Pilots are running with a number of hedge funds and family offices globally, and discussions are underway with exchanges, brokerages and financial-data providers.
Three graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology founded Itoflow, bringing together experience from some of the world's leading financial and technology companies. Co-founder and CEO Aditya Jha spent nine years as a quantitative researcher at JPMorgan, RBC and most recently Tower Research Capital, where he was Business Head for Mid-Frequency Trading. The wider founding team previously built large-scale infrastructure at Apple, Google and Microsoft and also brings quantitative research experience from JPMorgan. The funding will expand Itoflow's engineering and quantitative research teams, accelerate product development and support its commercial and regulatory work.
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.
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.
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.
