- Core banking technology firm Thought Machine has raised £30 million ($41 million) in funding from an unnamed Tier 1 bank. The bank, which is both a client and an investor, made its investment in May of this year.
- The funding will help support Thought Machine’s R&D expansion, including a pledge to hire more than 100 new engineers in 2026.
- The funding announcement comes as the company reported surpassing the $100 million revenue milestone for the year ending December 2025.
According to multiple reports, core banking technology firm Thought Machine has secured £30 million ($41 million) in funding from an unnamed Tier 1 bank that is also a Thought Machine client. The reports indicate that the investment was made in May of this year; Fintech Futures noted that the funding consisted of £9 million in primary funding and a £21 million secondary market transaction.
The investment will help power the company’s R&D expansion, including support for the firm’s new engineering office in Lisbon, Portugal, and the hiring of more than 100 new engineers. The capital will also help Thought Machine pursue its expansion in the US, having opened a new office in Miami to complement its regional headquarters in the US.
Word of Thought Machine’s spring investment comes as the firm announces that it has surpassed $100 million in total revenue for the financial year ending December 2025. This accomplishment reflects a 57% year-on-year increase in total revenue. Thought Machine also announced that, thanks to a multi-year commitment for several tier 1 bank migrations, the company’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) surpassed the $100 million threshold as of Q2 2026.
“Crossing the $100 million revenue threshold proves that the world’s largest banks are no longer thinking of cloud-native core technology as being solely for greenfield business, they are deploying it at scale for full bank migrations,” Thought Machine CEO and Founder Paul Taylor said. “We have established clear leadership in the tier 1 market because our platform properly fulfills the needs of banks at scale. With a strong balance sheet backed directly by our customer-investors, we have the financial maturity and the technology to power any bank, of any size, anywhere in the world.”
The investment also shines a light on Thought Machine’s other funding plans, namely a London IPO. While a consideration since the company’s Series D funding round in 2022, an initial public offering in the current financial climate is “difficult” in the words of the Thought Machine CEO. As such, he has pushed back the likelihood of a London IPO until 2028 “at the earliest,” and even criticized the merit of valuation as a performance metric relative to revenue.
“We are trying to put less emphasis on valuation and more emphasis on commercial success,” Taylor said. “Funding rounds are just not where we want the attention to be. We want the attention to be on commercial growth. Hitting revenue targets is a far better indicator of success than saying ‘look how valuable we are’.”
Thought Machine introduced itself to Finovate audiences at FinovateEurope 2018 in London. The company offers modern, cloud-based core banking and payments solutions—Vault Core and Vault Payments, respectively—that give financial institutions greater flexibility in creating new banking products and the ability to offer payment options for every method, scheme, and region around the globe. Founded in 2014, Thought Machine has 68 banks around the world using its technology, including 18 of the world’s largest institutions, representing more than 10% of the international market.
Photo by Alicja Ziaj on Unsplash
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