The investment accounting platform provider has just completed a round of Series C funding.
FundGuard, an investment accounting platform provider founded in 2018, has just raised $100 million via Series C funding — generally for late-stage startups — because the company is the first of its kind in 25 years to advance securities operations, company officials say.
FundGard will be using the cash infusion to hasten the development of its flagship platform and to fund general and administrative expenses and new go-to-market strategies. The company will also hire the staff it needs to make certain the company appeals to future multi-trillion dollar managers, officials tell FTF News.
This round was led by Key1 Capital, with support from new investors such as Euclidean Capital and funds managed by Hamilton Lane, officials say. There was also “strong participation” from incumbent strategic investors and FundGard’s earliest financial investors Blumberg Capital and Team8, officials say.
“Basically, we’re seeing a lot of demand in the market for what we’re doing,” Lior Yogev, CEO and founder of FundGard, tells FTF News.
The Boston-based company says that it offers “the industry’s first fully cloud-native, A.I.-powered, multi-asset class” platform, supporting the middle- and back-offices of investment funds, asset managers, asset owners, custodian banks, and fund administrators.
The key to FundGard’s success is that “there really hasn’t been innovation in this space for 25-plus years,” Yogev says. “And what we’re seeing is … demand and sheer interest in what we’re doing in terms of transition to the cloud, the leveraging of modern data platforms that help them digitize.”
FundGuard’s platform also appeals to firms that are thinking about how to use their data in the future in ways “they can’t really do on their legacy platforms,” Yogev says.
“We’re quite unique in this space because most other solutions have been out there for the last 30, 40 years. And when people are thinking about their next 30, 40 years and how they get to being multi-trillion dollar managers, they really need us,” Yogev adds. “So, we’re seeing a lot of interest to both execute on the clients that we have as well as on new opportunities that are coming to us.”
FundGuard also differentiates itself because of the functional areas where it attempts to solve problems.
“We provide automation tools within what we do in terms of modern workflows, collaboration tools, everything is API [application programming interface] first, and we’re the leaders in data science in this space,” Yogev says.
“When you get to the nuts and bolts of the industry, what’s really unique about us is really two things,” Yogev says.
The first aspect is” being able to service any number of stakeholders … whether it’s the back office, the middle office, the front office for purposes of trading, for purposes of performance measurement, for tax purposes, as well as for the official books and records, the official NAV [net asset value],” he says. “We’re able to achieve that with a single kind of fund and single kind of event or trade.”
“The second piece is … being able to know your cash, know your risk or positions on a real-time basis,” Yogev says. “When you want to go back and know … what was my real performance last Tuesday versus what I published at that point because I didn’t have full information.”
These are areas that firms “have really struggled with” and have assigned a lot of staff members to “in order to solve those issues throughout the years because the technology wasn’t there to support them,” Yogev says.
When asked if FundGuard had ever considered a merger with or an acquisition of an incumbent provider, Yogev acknowledges that there has been interest.
“[But] I would say at this point, we’re … focused on organically building out a set of capabilities, servicing the clients that we’ve won. But over the long term, we want to form partnerships with the different, I would say, like-minded, cloud-native kind of modern technology providers,” Yogev says.
Need a Reprint?