Thought Machine, one of the UK’s most valuable fintechs, is set to unveil that it has received £30m ($41m) funding from a "tier 1" bank later this year, as its annual revenues surpass $100m for the first time, it said.
The boss of the UK fintech also said the conditions “were difficult” for a London IPO, with an IPO at least two years away, and criticised valuations as a performance metric, saying revenues are a better measure.
Thought Machine is one of a new breed of fintechs which provide cloud-based banking services. Others in the space include 10x Banking, founded by former Barclays CEO Antony Jenkins, Mambu and Starling Bank’s Engine. Thought Machine, which provides services for traditional banks and challenger banks, counts Lloyds, JP Morgan Chase, Intesa Sanpaolo, the Italian bank, and Danish challenger bank Lunar as clients.
Last year, filings showed that Thought Machine raised £44.8m in a funding round in July 2025. Thought Machine did not publicise the funding round at the time. The UK fintech says it has raised an enlarged £80m in total.
This is inclusive of the £44.8m as well as £30m from a new unnamed “Tier 1” bank, which is also a client, Paul Taylor, Thought Machine CEO and founder, said.
Taylor, who founded Thought Machine in 2014, said part of the reason Thought Machine did not publicise last year’s funding round was that it was part of a bigger round.
He also said he did not like valuations as a gauge of success, preferring revenues.
Taylor said: “We are trying to put less emphasis on valuation and more emphasis on commercial success. Funding rounds are just not where we want the attention to be. We want the attention to be on commercial growth. Hitting revenue targets is a far better indicator of success than saying ‘look how valuable we are'."
Taylor declined to give a valuation following its latest funding round.
Thought Machine’s valuation hit $2.7bn in 2022 after a funding round featuring institutional investor Morgan Stanley.
Another investor, Molten Ventures, cut the value of its stake in Thought Machine by nearly 40 per cent to £5.9m between March and September 2024. Molten Ventures has since upped the valuation of its stake to £6.6m as of year-end March 2026. Thought Machine’s other investors include Lloyds, ING and Standard Chartered. Many of its investors are also clients.
Thought Machine says its latest accounts show it has surpassed $100m in revenues in 2025, marking a 57 per cent increase on the year before.
Taylor said this was a “huge milestone”. It also said it had reduced losses from nearly £70m to around £12m in the period.
Asked how it had managed to reduce losses, Taylor said that costs have been broadly even over the past four years, but revenues have been increasing, helped by the value of deals increasing year-on-year.
Thought Machine makes money by getting paid a usage fee by its clients, based on how many bank accounts are live on its platform.
Taylor says a banking client “will start small with a few hundred thousand accounts live and they put more and more traffic through it”.
Last year, Thought Machine inked deals with a big Canadian bank and an Australian bank, he said.
Thought Machine, which employs around 530 people, increasing headcount by over 90 in the year ending 2025, is a UK-headquartered business. But only around 15 per cent of revenues come from the UK, with the US, where it has offices in New York and Miami, its biggest market, ahead of Australia and Latin America.
Thought Machine has long been viewed as a possible candidate to list in London. Taylor said: “I would just love to get the London stock market going again; it’s just been in the doldrums for five years. But we have to act responsibly to the shareholders. If you look at the recent results on Nasdaq, it is just very, very impressive. We are a UK company; we would like to fly the flag. I still think the general conditions are difficult.”
He said Thought Machine would not be going public until at least 2028.
On the possibility of Andy Burnham being UK prime minister and the impact on startups and scale-ups, Taylor said there has been “wave after wave of anti-business sentiment, activity since Labour got in”.
One example of this was Labour increasing employers’ national insurance contributions.
But he said that UK entrepreneurs are “wildly optimistic" so Burnham’s policies, whatever they were, would not deter them.
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