Citi and State Street Invest in FundGuard

Large strategic investors Citi and State Street Corporation have participated in a a $40m Series B funding round into FundGuard, an AI-powered SaaS investment management and asset servicing enterprise platform.

Other investors in the round included Blumberg Capital, LionBird Ventures, Team8 Capital, and others to back the company’s future-ready technology approach to asset servicing.

Okan Pekin

Okan Pekin, Citi’s Global Head of Securities Services, said: “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.”

John Plansky, Head of State Street Alpha, added: “We are excited to partner with FundGuard and its comprehensive, cloud-native accounting platform to support our Alpha strategy.”

FundGuard was founded in 2018 to transform asset servicing operations by leveraging modern cloud and AI capabilities.

The Series B round brings total investment in FundGuard to more than $55m in 3.5 years.

The latest 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. 

The firm also appointed John Lehner, former State Street and BNY Mellon executive as FundGuard’s president.

Lehner said that by harnessing the cloud and AI, FundGuard’s technology enables their 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,” he said.

“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,” added Lior Yogev, FundGuard CEO and co-founder.