FundGuard, the AI-enhanced SaaS investment management and asset servicing enterprise platform, recently announced that it has finalized a $40 million Series B funding round.
The investment round included investors Citi and State Street Corp, who “joined initial investors Blumberg Capital, LionBird Ventures, Team8 Capital, and other investors to back the company’s future-ready technology approach to asset servicing.”
This round of financing comes after “a busy 12 months for FundGuard including landing asset manager, fund administration and custody bank customers, launching its enhanced investment accounting solution, including support for digital assets, and announcing the appointment of John Lehner, former State Street and BNY Mellon executive as FundGuard’s president.”
Lior Yogev, FundGuard CEO and co-founder, stated:
“Having the world’s leading financial services organizations join us as strategic partners and investors is an exciting endorsement of our vision to build a new-generation of global asset servicing capabilities for asset managers and their service providers,”
FundGuard President John Lehner remarked:
“By harnessing the cloud and AI, our technology enables our clients to be more cost effective and offer new and innovative products at scale. This new investment will allow us to accelerate our growth and continue to attract top talent so that we can meet the demand we are seeing from asset managers and service providers who realize their legacy technology, simply put, costs too much and can’t do what they need it to do.”
Okan Pekin, Citi’s Global Head of Securities Services added:
“We are thrilled to partner with FundGuard as they have built an attractive investment servicing platform that complements our vision to leverage cloud technologies to unlock the power of data for the benefit of our clients.” With $27.8 trillion1 in assets under custody and the industry-leading proprietary network with branches in 63 countries and global access to over 100 markets, Citi Securities Services provides clients with extensive on-the ground local market expertise, innovative post-trade technologies, customized data solutions and a wide range of custody and fund services that can be tailored to meet clients’ needs.
John Plansky, Head of State Street Alpha commented:
“We are excited to partner with FundGuard and its comprehensive, cloud-native accounting platform to support our Alpha strategy.”
This latest Series B round brings total investment in FundGuard “to more than $55 million in 3.5 years.”
As noted in a release, FundGuard claims to be “a next-generation SaaS platform for investment management and administration that is powered by AI.”
FundGuard helps asset managers and fund administrators “to manage mutual funds, ETFs, hedge funds, insurance products, and pension funds, supporting digital transformation, operations automation, AI-based insights, resiliency, and migration to the cloud.”
FundGuard is “backed by strategic partners including Citi and State Street Corp, venture firms Blumberg Capital, LionBird Ventures, and Team8 Capital among others, as well as industry executives Heidi Miller, Jack Klinck, Jay Mandelbaum and others.”
Citi, which claims to be the leading global bank, “has approximately 200 million customer accounts and does business in more than 160 countries and jurisdictions.”
Citi provides consumers, corporations, governments, and institutions with “a broad range of financial products and services, including consumer banking and credit, corporate and investment banking, securities brokerage, transaction services, and wealth management.”
State Street Corporation (NYSE: STT) claims to be one of the “leading providers of financial services to institutional investors including investment servicing, investment management and investment research and trading.”
With $41.7 trillion in assets under custody and/or administration and $4.0 trillion in assets under management as of March 31, 2022, State Street operates globally “in more than 100 geographic markets and employs approximately 39,000 worldwide.”