Staff at wealth managers still keep thousands of portfolios in line with spreadsheets. MDOTM, a startup founded in London in 2015, wants software to do that job, and investors just handed it $27 million to try.
The company closed a growth-equity round led by Expedition Growth Capital. Total funding now stands at $36.5 million. MDOTM has offices in New York and Milan, and it sells an AI platform called Sphere to banks and asset managers.
The numbers it offers: Sphere supports more than $100 billion in assets across over 60 financial institutions, among them Morgan Stanley, Amundi and Zurich Bank. Fresh capital goes to hiring and to expanding in the US and Europe.
Three modules and a lab
Sphere is built for the work between the big decisions. It reads market and macroeconomic data to flag shifts, then combines that with an investment team’s own views to build and rebalance portfolios at scale. Generative AI writes the client reports and commentary.
The platform has three parts. The first spots changes in market conditions and generates forward-looking signals. Portfolio Studio constructs and rebalances portfolios. StoryFolio drafts client reports. A research group called the MDOTM Lab, with more than 20 professors and PhDs, works on machine learning, portfolio theory and AI ethics.
Why the middle office
Fees are falling and clients want tailored portfolios. Adding analysts doesn’t scale. Steve Twomey of Expedition, who led the round, put it plainly: “The work in the middle still happens in spreadsheets: rebalancing, keeping portfolios aligned with house views and generating client commentary.”
Chief executive Tommaso Migliore said asset and wealth managers have moved on from asking whether to use AI in investment decisions. The question now, he said, is how to deploy it across thousands of portfolios “while maintaining control.” In the UK, MDOTM operates as an appointed representative under the Financial Conduct Authority regime, and it says it keeps humans in charge and makes the AI show its work.
Others are chasing the same gap. Former Citadel quants in the US raised $78 million for a wealth-management AI system, and Starling has launched an agentic assistant.
Twomey joins MDOTM’s board, as does James Hays, a former chief executive of Wells Fargo Advisors with nearly 40 years in the industry.
