The buzziest corner of finance AI is not the trading desk. It is the dull middle office, where staff keep thousands of portfolios in line with spreadsheets. A London-founded startup just raised $27mn to automate exactly that.
The company is MDOTM. It has closed a $27mn growth-equity round led by Expedition Growth Capital, it said. The deal takes the total raised to $36.5mn. Founded in London in 2015, with offices in New York and Milan, MDOTM sells an AI platform called Sphere to banks and asset managers.
Sphere now supports more than $100bn in assets across over 60 financial institutions, the company said. Its named clients include Morgan Stanley, Amundi, and Zurich Bank. The new money will fund hiring and a push deeper into the US and European markets.
The spreadsheet problem
Sphere is built for the grind between the big decisions. It reads market and macroeconomic data to flag shifts in conditions. Investment teams add their own views, and the software turns all of it into portfolios it can build and rebalance at scale. A generative-AI layer then writes the client reports and commentary on its own.
