London-founded MDOTM closed a $27 million growth-equity round led by Expedition Growth Capital, bringing total funding to $36.5 million, according to The Next Web and the company’s press release via BusinessWire. The money will fund US and European expansion for Sphere, MDOTM’s AI platform that automates portfolio management for banks and asset managers.
What Sphere Does
Sphere handles the middle-office work that sits between investment decisions and client delivery. It reads market and macroeconomic data, flags shifts in conditions, takes input from investment teams, then builds and rebalances portfolios at scale. A generative AI layer autonomously writes client reports and market commentary.
The platform breaks into three components: a signal engine that spots market condition changes and generates forward-looking indicators, Portfolio Studio for building and rebalancing portfolios from those signals, and StoryFolio for drafting client reports. Behind it sits an academic network of more than 20 professors and PhDs focused on machine learning, portfolio theory, and AI ethics, per The Next Web.
Sphere currently supports more than $100 billion in assets across over 60 financial institutions. Named clients include Morgan Stanley, Amundi, and Zurich Bank, according to the company’s press release.
The Middle-Office Thesis
“The work in the middle still happens in spreadsheets: rebalancing, keeping portfolios aligned with house views and generating client commentary,” said Steve Twomey, the Expedition partner who led the round, per The Next Web. His argument is that this layer is where agents can do immediately useful work without triggering the regulatory complexity of automated trading.
The logic tracks: portfolio rebalancing is high-confidence, highly repetitive, and produces measurable outcomes (AUM growth, fee optimization, time savings). It is a textbook first-deployment use case for autonomous agents in regulated industries.
A Crowded Race
MDOTM is not the only team targeting financial middle-office automation. Former Citadel quants raised $78 million for a similar wealth management system, according to The Next Web. Starling Bank has shipped an agentic financial assistant. The pattern extends beyond finance: legal back offices, hospitals, and insurance operations are all seeing agent deployments aimed at the same type of repetitive, compliance-constrained workflow.
MDOTM CEO Tommaso Migliore framed the market shift directly: “Asset and Wealth Managers are no longer asking whether to use AI in investment decisions, but how to deploy it at scale across thousands of portfolios while maintaining control,” per The Next Web.
Founded in 2015, MDOTM took a decade and $36.5 million to reach this point. Expedition Growth Capital, which backs capital-efficient software companies, led the round. Former Wells Fargo Advisors CEO James Hays joins the board alongside Twomey.