Thought Machine hits £2.2bn valuation after Morgan Stanley investment

London-based fintech Thought Machine has doubled its valuation to $2.7bn (£2.2bn) after a $160m funding round featuring institutional investor Morgan Stanley.

The Series D round was led by Singaporean investor Temasek, with Italian bank Intesa Sanpaolo and Morgan Stanley participating. Lloyds TSB Group also provided capital.

Founded in 2014, Thought Machine is a cloud-based banking infrastructure specialist that allows banks across the world to scale up servers and processing power.

The company boasts a client list made up of some of the biggest names in international banking, including JP Morgan, Lloyds Banking Group, Standard Chartered and neobank Atom.

Thought Machine intends to use the new funding to expand into new markets in Asia, specifically Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia.

“We intend to become the leader in core banking technology, and are being deployed by the biggest, most successful banks around the world,” said Paul Taylor, founder of Thought Machine.

“We will use this new capital to accelerate our expansion plans, serve more clients around the world, and continuously refine the capabilities of our core banking platform and other products.”

Thought Machine operates in the cloud computing space, and while it is aware of the market dominance that Big Tech firms like Amazon have in the cloud, Taylor feels confident there is space for what his company does.

“You have to focus on what is key — Google has done really well on enterprise, but it can’t do everything,” Taylor said in an interview with The Financial Times.

“There are things like payments, fraud, anti-money laundering, tonnes of stuff.”

Investors Intesa Sanpaolo expressed confidence in Thought Machine’s ability to grow rapidly.

“Thought Machine’s cloud-based technology is fundamental to our transformation from incumbent to digital challenger, improving our core banking technology and providing the foundation for our new digital bank, Isybank,” said Carlo Messina, managing director and CEO.

Now sitting at a valuation of $2.7bn, Thought Machine hit the unicorn value of $1bn for the first time after a $200m Series C funding round back in November 2021.