London-based Itoflow has raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding to build AI agents that automate investment research and portfolio monitoring for hedge funds, family offices and wealth managers.
The round was led by Balderton Capital, with Cleo founder Barney Hussey-Yeo among the angel investors. The fresh capital will go towards engineering and quantitative research hires, product development, regulatory engagement and commercial expansion.
Founded in 2026, Itoflow claims it gives smaller investment firms access to the kind of systematic research infrastructure traditionally built by large quantitative hedge funds.
Investment teams describe their strategy, risk limits and review criteria in plain English. Itoflow’s agents then turn those instructions into repeatable workflows, running quantitative research and backtests, monitoring portfolios and flagging significant changes with supporting evidence.
The company says the aim is not to replace a fund’s investment philosophy, but to automate more of the machinery around it.
That could allow teams to analyse more investments and portfolios without hiring a large internal quantitative research operation.
Itoflow was founded by three Indian Institute of Technology graduates. CEO Aditya Jha spent nine years in quantitative research at JPMorgan, RBC and Tower Research Capital, where he was Business Head for Mid-Frequency Trading. Other members of the founding team previously worked on infrastructure at Apple, Google and Microsoft, as well as quantitative research at JPMorgan.
The platform currently covers assets including equities, bonds, ETFs, commodities and digital assets.
Itoflow says it also offers control and security. It says customers can define which actions require human approval, while institutional clients can deploy the software inside their own infrastructure so proprietary strategies and sensitive data do not need to leave their environment.
The company is currently piloting the platform with hedge funds and family offices and says it is in talks with exchanges, brokers and financial-data providers.
Jha said that the company’s longer-term ambition is to build “self-improving investment agents” capable of learning which strategies continue to work, discovering new signals and identifying when an investment edge has disappeared.
Speaking to Pathfounders, he said there were few competitors: “There's nothing on the hedge fund side that we know of. There is similar tech that's being built on the investment banking side… but they've steered away from the asset management and hedge fund industries.”
He said Balderton had been moved to invest because “they knew that there was something that's gonna happen in the space sooner rather than later. And when I got in touch with them, and they saw the pitch. They saw the speed of build-out. So the speed at which we were building things out between the first conversation and subsequent conversations. They really found that awesome. They really liked my story, my background, the team that I had assembled, and I think that was it.”
Balderton principal Sivesh Sukumar said in a statement that Itoflow could change the economics of systematic investing by giving more firms access to capabilities that previously required expensive specialist teams and infrastructure.