Itoflow, a startup building AI tools for professional investment teams, has raised $2.5m in pre-seed funding led by Balderton Capital.
The London-based company, founded this year, is developing AI “agents” that learn how an individual investment firm researches ideas, manages risk, and reviews portfolios, then turn that approach into automated workflows that run continuously across global markets and asset classes, from equities and bonds to commodities and digital assets.
Rather than imposing a house investment style, it aims to replicate each client’s process, allowing teams to cover more investments and portfolios without hiring a much larger research function.
The round also drew angel investors including Cleo founder Barney Hussey-Yeo. Itoflow said it would use the money to expand its engineering and quantitative research teams, develop the product and support its commercial and regulatory work.
The company was founded by three graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology, led by chief executive Aditya Jha, previously a quantitative researcher at JPMorgan, RBC and Tower Research Capital, with the wider team drawn from Apple, Google and Microsoft.
Itoflow is running pilots with hedge funds and family offices and is in talks with exchanges, brokerages and data providers. It said customers retain control over how the technology operates and can run it within their own infrastructure to keep sensitive data and strategies in-house.
Aditya Jha, co-founder and CEO of Itoflow, said: “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.”