London-based Itoflow has closed a $2.5m (£1.8m) pre-seed round led by Balderton Capital, with Cleo founder Barney Hussey-Yeo among the angels backing a company founded only this year.
Itoflow was founded in 2026 by Aditya Jha, who spent nine years at Tower Research Capital and left as business head of mid-frequency trading, alongside engineers Abinash Meher and Dibya Jyoti Roy, who previously built large-scale infrastructure at Apple, Google and Microsoft. Jha had earlier worked as a quantitative researcher at JPMorgan and RBC.
The company sells AI agents that encode an investment firm's own research and risk process rather than imposing a house strategy. Teams describe their approach, risk limits and review criteria in plain English; the agents then run quantitative research and backtesting, monitor portfolios continuously and flag material changes with supporting evidence.
Coverage spans equities, bonds, ETFs, commodities and digital assets. Clients set which actions require human sign-off, and institutional customers can run the platform on their own systems to keep strategies confidential.
Balderton led the round. Angel participation included Hussey-Yeo. Valuation, ownership split and the size of the option pool were not disclosed, and Itoflow has no prior institutional funding on record.
The proceeds will go towards expanding the engineering and quantitative research teams, accelerating product development and supporting commercial and regulatory work.
Itoflow is running three pilots — an asset manager, an ETF provider and a mid-size hedge fund — the largest of which has roughly $3bn of assets under monitoring. More than 260 users have signed up to the platform, though the near-term commercial focus is converting the enterprise pipeline rather than self-serve.
Jha's pitch rests on build time. He has said that even at Tower Research, assembling the data, research pipelines, backtesting and execution infrastructure for a new team could take six to eighteen months, and that the constraint for smaller firms is infrastructure and specialist talent rather than a shortage of ideas.
Sivesh Sukumar, a principal at Balderton, framed the investment as a change in the economics of that model, giving smaller firms capabilities previously reserved for the largest managers.
The competitive set is filling up. Toronto's Boosted.ai has raised $61m to date for a comparable research and monitoring assistant, while Danelfin scores individual equities and Composer offers no-code strategy building for retail investors. Itoflow's differentiator is encoding a client's existing process across a wider asset mix — a claim that will be tested by compliance teams as much as by portfolio managers.
Original source: UKTN — https://www.uktech.news/ai/itoflow-secures-1-8m-to-build-ai-agents-for-investor-portfolio-management-20260825
