Balderton Capital leads $2.5M pre-seed round in Itoflow, an AI investment research platform
Balderton Capital leads $2.5M pre-seed round in Itoflow, an AI investment research platform #
London-based startup Itoflow has closed a $2.5 million pre-seed funding round to expand its AI-powered platform for investment research and portfolio management, with Balderton Capital as lead investor. Angel investors also joined the round, including Barney Hussey-Yeo, founder of personal finance app Cleo.
Itoflow was co-founded by Aditya Jha, who spent nine years inside the high-performance trading infrastructure of Tower Research Capital, most recently as head of mid-frequency trading. His central observation was that the sophisticated research, back-testing, and strategy-monitoring systems that elite hedge funds spend years and tens of millions of dollars building remain entirely out of reach for the vast majority of investment firms. Itoflow’s platform is designed to close that gap by deploying AI agents that work alongside portfolio managers and analysts throughout the investment process, from idea generation and hypothesis testing to ongoing risk monitoring.
According to the company, it is already running three enterprise pilots: one with an asset manager, one with an ETF provider, and one with a mid-size hedge fund. The largest of those engagements involves roughly $3 billion in assets currently being monitored by Itoflow’s system. The platform has also attracted more than 260 sign-ups since launch, though the near-term commercial priority is converting the enterprise pipeline rather than scaling self-serve adoption.
Sivesh Sukumar, a principal at Balderton Capital, said the firm’s investment thesis centres on the belief that access to systematic, institutional-grade capabilities has historically been gated by the cost and complexity of building proprietary infrastructure. He argued that Jha and the Itoflow team are fundamentally changing the economics of that model.
Hussey-Yeo echoed the sentiment, pointing to what he described as Itoflow’s commitment to keeping investment teams in control of their own judgment, a principle he said he learned firsthand building Cleo, where trust and transparency proved essential to making financial AI work for end users.
The funding will support further product development and help the company broaden its enterprise reach. Itoflow enters a crowded but rapidly expanding market for AI tools aimed at institutional and semi-institutional investors, competing with both established data vendors and a new wave of AI-native fintech challengers.
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