Thema, a portfolio expansion infrastructure platform for private equity investors, has raised £4.6 million in combined funding. The raise comprises £3.3 million in pre-seed capital led by Stride.vc, with participation from KDX, Capital Allocators, and a group of angels spanning private equity, investment banking, and enterprise software. Separately, it has been awarded a £1.3 million UK government grant in partnership with the University of Cambridge to advance trustworthy AI.
The funding will be used to expand research and development and commercial operations as it continues to onboard customers. Thema was developed in close collaboration with tier-one private equity firms and as part of a UK government-backed programme with the University of Cambridge.
It builds what it describes as Portfolio Expansion Infrastructure - the system private equity investors use to decide where to expand, where to originate deals, and where risk sits across a portfolio. The platform is designed to replace fragmented consulting reports and point-in-time sourcing tools with a continuously updated view of market structure. It helps investors answer questions about where opportunity and risk sit across holdings, where to originate deals, and which adjacencies each platform company should pursue.
The platform uses proprietary AI techniques developed by co-founder Dr Dimo Angelov, creator of the Top2Vec open-source project, to process web-scale data and reveal how companies cluster into markets, which adjacencies exist, and how those structures evolve over time.
Existing data providers built structured datasets for humans reading spreadsheets, not AI systems reasoning about markets. What’s missing is the contextual infrastructure layer: company relationships, market structure, and temporal tracking of how these evolve. We’ve started with PE platform expansion because the stakes are highest – billion-dollar decisions that must be defensible to Investment Committees. But the infrastructure we’re building will become foundational for every AI system that needs to understand markets.
Thema is building a living map of how markets are structured and how platforms expand. Think of Thema as a dynamic intelligence layer guiding private equity investors in a chaotic, fast-moving world – delivering unique insights in a sea of sameness.
