Thought Machine has raised $83 million to continue investment in its core engineering capability and drive expansion into the Asia Pacific region.

All existing investors - Lloyds Banking Group, IQ Capital, Backed and Playfair Capital - participated in the round, with IQ Capital contributing £15 million from their new scale up fund.

Founded in 2014 by entrepreneur and former Google engineer Paul Taylor, the company has built a core banking solution, Vault, entirely in the cloud. Thought Machine now counts Lloyds Banking Group, Standard Chartered, SEB and Atom Bank as clients.

Last year, the firm opened a Singapore office, with sales, marketing and a dedicated professional services function to oversee deployments of Vault into banks in the region. This year, Thought Machine plans to launch in Australia and Japan, with North America to follow later in 2020.

Headquarters in London have been undergoing rapid growth, with the team going from 50 in 2018 to more than 300 today.

Chief executive Paul Taylor commented: “For the past six years, our purpose has been to offer banks a next-generation solution to liberate them from legacy systems which plague the financial services industry.

“This funding round comes at a pivotal stage in the company’s growth – customer demand is huge, and this investment allows us to grow rapidly enough to serve all our target markets,” he continued, adding: “As well as international expansion, we will put further investment into our core technology, ensuring that banks will always have the best possible cloud native platform, and allow them to keep up with technology breakthroughs in the future which bring agility, security, resilience and good economics.”

Max Bautin, founding partner of IQ Capital, said: “We first backed Thought Machine at seed stage in 2016 and have seen it grow from a startup to a 300-person strong global scaleup with a global customer base and potential to become one of the most valuable European fintech companies.”

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