Lausanne Wealthtech Startup Light Frame Closes Oversubscribed $5.1M Seed to Modernise Private Banking Infrastructure
Lausanne Wealthtech Startup Light Frame Closes Oversubscribed $5.1M Seed to Modernise Private Banking Infrastructure #
Light Frame, a Swiss-American fintech founded by alumni of digital private bank Alpian, has closed an oversubscribed $5.1 million seed round to develop cloud-native core banking and portfolio management software for the wealth management industry.
Fortino Ventures led the round, joined by new investors Sidekick Partners, Tenity, Chamaeleon, and AltaIR Capital. Existing backers Rogue Venture Partners, New Stack Ventures, and Studio Alpha also participated, according to the company. Combined with a $1.7 million pre-seed round raised in 2024, Light Frame has disclosed total funding of approximately $6.8 million.
The company was founded in 2024 and is headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland. Its founding team comes from Alpian, Switzerland’s first cloud-native private bank. CEO Schuyler Weiss led Alpian from inception until it was acquired by Fideuram, the private banking unit of Italy’s Intesa Sanpaolo. Co-founder Mathieu Clément served as Alpian’s COO and CIO. Philippe Kernevez and Gregory Bataille are also among the founders.
Light Frame’s platform uses a cloud and API-first architecture with AI built in from the outset. The modular structure allows private banks, wealth managers, and asset managers to replace individual legacy components or adopt the full stack, with the stated goal of reducing implementation time and cost. The company said the technology already supports live client operations.
Weiss said his experience running Alpian on legacy infrastructure exposed the problem directly: those systems were expensive, slow to modify, and limited in functionality. His contention is that effective AI adoption in wealth management requires modern infrastructure at the base, not AI tools added on top of older systems.
Hugh Phelan, Investment Manager at Fortino Ventures, said the founding team’s experience running a regulated Swiss bank on the type of infrastructure Light Frame is now replacing gives it an advantage in a market where migration risk is a primary concern for prospective clients.
The new capital will fund further product development and expansion of the company’s commercial team across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, where Light Frame said it is already seeing growing institutional adoption.
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