Itoflow, a London startup building AI agents for professional investment teams, has raised £1.8M ($2.5M) in pre-seed funding led by Balderton Capital.

The biggest quant funds spend years and serious money building the research teams and systems needed to test ideas, manage risk and react as markets move. Most hedge funds, asset managers and family offices cannot afford that machinery, so their research and portfolio reviews stay manual, slow and hard to apply consistently.

Itoflow does not sell an investment strategy. Teams write down their own approach, risk limits and review criteria in plain English, and Itoflow's agents turn that into governed workflows that run quantitative research and backtests, monitor portfolios around the clock and flag material changes with the evidence behind them. It covers equities, bonds, ETFs, commodities and digital assets. Customers decide which actions need human approval, and institutional clients can deploy it inside their own infrastructure so proprietary strategies stay in-house. The company built its agent infrastructure from scratch, arguing that agents meant to run for months or years need tighter control over security and reliability.

Founded this year, Itoflow is running pilots with hedge funds and family offices globally and is in talks with exchanges, brokerages and financial data providers. CEO Aditya Jha spent nine years in quantitative research at J.P. Morgan, RBC and Tower Research Capital, where he ran the mid-frequency trading business. CTO Abinash Meher and co-founder Dibya Jyoti Roy previously built infrastructure at Google, Apple and Microsoft. Jha says the long-term aim is "self-improving investment agents" that learn which approaches keep working and spot when an edge has faded.

Angel investors including Cleo founder Barney Hussey-Yeo also took part. The money will grow Itoflow's engineering and quantitative research teams, speed up product development and fund its commercial and regulatory work.

Sources