CIBC Becomes First Major Canadian Bank to Deploy Thought Machine's Vault Core, Confirmed as Mystery £30M Investor
CIBC Becomes First Major Canadian Bank to Deploy Thought Machine’s Vault Core, Confirmed as Mystery £30M Investor #
Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce has confirmed it will become the first major Canadian bank to deploy Thought Machine’s Vault Core cloud-native banking platform, and that it is the undisclosed Tier 1 institution that invested £30 million in the UK fintech earlier this year. The announcement was made on 29 October.
According to CIBC’s newsroom, the bank will initially roll out Vault Core to power The Simplii Account, its no-fee digital banking product, before extending the platform more broadly across its retail operations. CIBC said it intends to use its own product and engineering teams to build features and experiences directly on the Vault Core foundation, an approach it says gives it greater control over product development timelines.
Hratch Panossian, Senior Executive Vice-President of Personal and Business Banking at CIBC, said the technology is intended to enable the bank to go beyond simply building modern products, but to fundamentally accelerate its transformation agenda. CIBC serves approximately 15 million personal, business, public sector, and institutional clients across Canada, the United States, and internationally.
That investment corresponds to a funding transaction reported in July, when Thought Machine’s audited accounts, filed in May 2026, disclosed a £30 million deal with an unnamed Tier 1 bank client. The deal comprised £9 million in primary funding via convertible loan notes and a £21 million secondary market transaction designed to allow employees to sell share options. Thought Machine CEO and founder Paul Taylor confirmed at the time that the investor was also a client but declined to name them. CIBC is now confirmed as that backer.
Taylor welcomed CIBC “both as a strategic partner and as an investor” as the firm expands across the bank’s retail operations. Thought Machine crossed $100 million in total revenue for the financial year ending December 2025, a 57% year-on-year increase, and its annual recurring revenue also passed $100 million as of Q2 2026, driven by multi-year commitments tied to several Tier 1 bank migrations. The firm says it has now signed 68 banks globally, 18 of which are classed as Tier 1 institutions.
The CIBC deal comes alongside a broader expansion push that includes a new engineering hub in Lisbon, a plan to hire more than 100 engineers in 2026, and a growing US footprint with offices in Miami.
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