The start-up FundGuard, which develops an AI-based cloud platform for investment portfolio management, today announced the closure of a $ 40 million B round of funding. The round of funding was led by Bank City and State Street. Following the investment, the two entities will also become customers of the company. The existing round of investment was also attended by existing investors in Lemberg Capital, Lionbird Ventures and Team8 Capital, along with other investors. A total of over $ 55 million since its inception.
Pandgard was founded in 2018 by Lior Yogev, who serves as the company’s CEO, Yaniv Zakaria, CTO and Uri Katz, vice president of research and development. The three founders met more than 25 years ago when they were officers in Unit 8200. Yogev has a business and financial background from Goldman Sachs where he was an investment banker, and in addition he also managed the North American region at a leading technology company that sold to Temenos for $ 265 million. Zakaria was a co-founder of Bluetail, which was sold to Salesforce, and after the acquisition managed the Salesforce R&D center in Israel. Katz worked in development positions at several companies in the field of big data and the fintech company TipRanks.
Pandgard currently employs over 50 people, 40 of them in Israel and the rest in the US. Following the recruitment, the company plans to double the number of employees in the coming year, focusing on developers with experience in developing large, complex and data-intensive systems, and product people with experience connecting the technological and financial worlds.
The company appeals to institutional entities, including banks and investment houses, which manage capital of over $ 10 billion and its clients include a number of such entities from the world’s leading, currently focusing on the American and European markets. The total assets managed by the company’s clients cross $ 10 trillion managed by tens of thousands of funds.
The current round of funding has closed after the company experienced significant growth and development in its value proposition in the past year, including customer assimilation, launching a solution for managing digital assets, and the appointment of John Lahner, a former senior executive at State Street and BNY Mellon. The world of funds relies on outdated infrastructure that helps manage investments and collapses from the growing volume of trading, the complexity of traded assets and the need for efficiency, given the competition over the amount of fees and increasing regulation. As a result, there is a growing demand for automated solutions that enable high volume of activity, improve operational efficiency and help dramatically cut expenses.
Fundgard’s solution offers investment management in various products including mutual funds, ETFs and hedge funds. The platform is flexible and allows for large volumes of work while automating portfolio management and administration with the help of artificial intelligence capabilities, and reducing costs with the help of improving workflow and collaboration capabilities. The artificial intelligence platform provides the growing needs in the industry for computerized solutions that encompass all types of assets and enable accelerating processes, identifying anomalies and providing practical insights.
Lior Yogev, CEO and co-founder of Pandgard, said: “It is a significant achievement for us to join the world’s leading financial organizations in a strategic partnership with us and it is another step in realizing our vision to build a new generation platform that provides global asset management capabilities for their asset managers and service providers.”
Pundgard President John Lehner said: “By harnessing the capabilities of the cloud and artificial intelligence, our technology enables our customers to be more cost effective and offer new and innovative products on a large scale. The new investment will allow us to accelerate the company’s growth We see asset managers and financial service providers who understand that their Legacy technologies are simply unsatisfactory, carry high costs and can not do what is required of them. ”
Okan Peking, senior at City leading the bank’s securities services globally, said: “We are excited to partner with Pandgard in building an impressive investment management service platform that complements our vision to leverage cloud technologies to leverage data and create value for our customers.”
John Plansky, CEO of State Street Alpha Division, added: “We are pleased to partner with Pandgard who has developed a comprehensive SaaS platform for managing funds and their accounting needs.”
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