Exclusive: Balderton backs Itoflow’s $2.5M raise to bring institutional-grade portfolio AI to smaller investment firms

Itoflow has landed a $2.5 million pre-seed round led by Balderton Capital, with angel backing from names including Barney Hussey-Yeo of Cleo. The London startup is building AI software for investment firms that want portfolio research, testing and monitoring without spending years building the plumbing themselves.

That pitch comes straight from founder Aditya Jha’s own career. He spent nine years inside Tower Research Capital, where he was Business Head for Mid-Frequency Trading, and before that worked as a quantitative researcher at JPMorgan and RBC. His lesson was blunt: even at one of the most sophisticated firms around, a new team could take six to eighteen months just to assemble the data, research pipelines, backtesting, monitoring and execution stack it needed.

Itoflow is trying to compress that into something an investment team can describe in plain English. Firms define their strategy, risk limits and review criteria in their own words, then the platform turns that into a repeatable workflow. It runs quantitative research and backtesting, watches portfolios across stocks, bonds, ETFs, commodities and digital assets, and flags meaningful changes with supporting evidence. Customers can choose which actions need human approval, and institutional users can keep the system on their own infrastructure to protect strategy confidentiality.

The company says it built its agent infrastructure from scratch, partly to keep tighter control over security and reliability as markets shift. It is already running three pilots: one with an asset manager, one with an ETF provider and one with a mid-size hedge fund. The largest is monitoring roughly $3 billion in assets. Itoflow also says more than 260 people have signed up, though for now it cares more about turning those pilots into enterprise deals than chasing self-serve users.

The field is crowded. Boosted.ai, Danelfin and Composer are all in adjacent territory, but Itoflow is betting that encoding a firm’s own process — instead of handing it a ready-made one — is the part compliance teams will pay for. Maybe. Or maybe the real moat is just that every fund likes the idea of “control” right up until the model starts improvising before breakfast.