The systems running much of the world's asset management industry—that sprawling $147 trillion universe—are, to put it charitably, showing their age. Some date to the Clinton administration. Many weren't designed with the internet in mind, let alone tokenized securities or real-time investor portals.
ZILO, a London-based fintech barely five years old, thinks it can fix that. And judging by who's writing checks—and, more tellingly, who's become a customer—the company might be onto something.
The startup closed a $27 million Series A2 extension in late September, led by return backer Portage and joined by State Street, the custody giant that happens to be both investor and client. The round, which actually began with an £11 million tranche in July, values ZILO roughly 26% higher than its prior financing less than two years ago, according to City A.M. CEO Philip Goffin told reporters the company commanded "higher multiples" this time around, though he declined to share the precise post-money figure. For a B2B infrastructure play in an industry not exactly known for rapid adoption, that's notable.
What ZILO is selling—cloud-native transfer agency infrastructure—sounds arcane until you consider what transfer agents actually do. They're the record-keepers of finance: tracking who owns which shares of which funds, processing subscriptions and redemptions, handling investor onboarding, maintaining compliance records. Unglamorous, perhaps. But foundational. And lucrative for the handful of vendors that have dominated the space for decades.
The pitch ZILO makes to asset managers and custodians is straightforward, if ambitious: swap out your legacy system—the one cobbled together in 1999, patched a hundred times since, running on infrastructure nobody under 40 knows how to maintain—for a platform built this decade. One codebase, one architecture, handling multiple currencies and regions and asset types. Including, in theory, those tokenized securities everyone keeps talking about but few are actually trading yet.
When Your Investors Become Your Customers
Here's where the story gets interesting. ZILO's cap table reads like a roll call of old-line financial services firms. Fidelity International Strategic Ventures co-led the January 2024 Series A alongside Portage. Citi participated. So did State Street.
Then those investors started signing contracts.
Fidelity International adopted ZILO's platform for its private assets business by March 2024. A year later, State Street announced it was re-entering the UK transfer agency market—using ZILO as the underlying rails—and signed River Global as its inaugural client. The company says it's brought on two of the world's five largest custodians and a top-five asset manager since going live in mid-2023, though it's only publicly confirmed State Street and Fidelity.
That kind of validation matters. These aren't early adopters placing small bets on shiny new technology. They're institutions whose risk committees don't greenlight vendor changes lightly, particularly in the back office, where an error in investor records can trigger regulatory inquiries or worse. The fact that several wrote investment checks before writing purchase orders suggests the product cleared internal hurdles that kill most enterprise fintech pitches.
Still, traction with marquee names doesn't mean broad adoption. ZILO is competing against entrenched players like SS&C's Global Investor & Distribution Solutions, Bravura's Rufus platform, and Temenos Multifonds (recently sold to private equity for around $400 million, a deal that signals both value and, perhaps, the challenge of innovation within legacy providers). Those vendors have been doing this for decades. They know where the bodies are buried. They've handled every edge case imaginable.
The Migration Problem
ZILO seems aware of this. One of its more interesting bets is ZILO Migrate, an AI-powered tool designed to move investor records from legacy systems to its cloud platform. Ask any CTO who's attempted a data migration of that scale, and you'll hear war stories: inconsistent formats, incomplete historical records, mapping errors that cascade into compliance nightmares.
If ZILO can meaningfully de-risk that process—make it faster, cleaner, less prone to the kinds of errors that result in six-month delay announcements and executive turnover—it removes one of the largest barriers to switching. The company hasn't published detailed case studies or metrics around migration speed or data integrity improvements, which would strengthen the claim. But dedicating product resources and fresh capital to the problem suggests ZILO sees it as a competitive wedge.
The broader product suite includes ZILO Invest, a white-labeled investment portal, and what the company describes as "future-ready" infrastructure capable of handling tokenized assets. That last bit is partly vision, partly hedge. The tokenization of traditional securities keeps getting predicted, keeps not quite arriving at scale. But if and when it does, ZILO wants to be the platform that doesn't require a rebuild.
Growing Pains and Growing Up
The company says it hit £4.9 million in revenue for 2024, nearly double the year before, per corporate filings reviewed by City A.M. Those numbers are now over a year old—ZILO hasn't updated them publicly—but the revenue curve suggests the business is past pilot projects and into commercial deployment. The team has grown to around 130 employees, a headcount that signals operational scaling rather than speculative hiring.
Recent executive additions point to a company maturing quickly. Andrew Cole joined as COO last October. Doug Boyce took on an executive role in February. ZILO has made several other senior hires across product, technology, and operations—the kind of bench-building that precedes either a major geographic expansion or a sprint toward profitability.
The company also completed a SOC 2 Type II audit through A-LIGN earlier this year, stacking it atop an earlier ISO/IEC 27001 certification. For enterprise buyers in financial services, those aren't differentiators. They're table stakes. You don't get a meeting without them.
A Crowded, Sticky Market
The competitive field extends beyond legacy vendors. A cohort of well-funded fintechs—Anduin, Flow, Passthrough, fundcraft, Sydecar—has raised capital in recent years to modernize various slices of fund administration and private markets infrastructure. Some target the GP-LP relationship. Others focus on cap table management or investor onboarding for venture funds. ZILO's bet is narrower: own the core transfer agency layer, and build out from there.
Whether that strategy works depends on execution and timing. The asset management industry will reach $200 trillion by 2030, according to PwC's projections—a figure that, if accurate, represents one of the largest addressable markets in enterprise software. But it's also one of the most conservative. Change happens slowly. Procurement cycles stretch across quarters. A single contract can take a year to close.
ZILO's advantage, if it has one, is that the incumbents are genuinely old. Not just old in the sense of "we've been around a while," but old in the sense of systems architecture designed for on-premise servers and nightly batch processing. Cloud-native isn't a buzzword in this context—it's a fundamentally different approach to uptime, scalability, and data access.
The $27 million from this latest round is earmarked for global expansion, new market entry, and continued AI tool development. The company hasn't specified which geographies it's targeting next, though the logical moves would be deeper into Europe or a US push. Either would be expensive. The burn rate isn't public, but with 130 employees and ongoing product development, the runway from this raise likely stretches into 2026 and beyond—assuming revenue growth continues tracking upward.
The Long Game
Infrastructure businesses in finance are, above all, marathons. The early wins with State Street and Fidelity are meaningful, but ZILO is still in the early chapters of a much longer story. The platform launched commercially less than three years ago. Most enterprise software companies are still figuring out product-market fit at that stage. ZILO appears to have found it, at least with a narrow slice of very large customers.
The question now is whether it can translate that into broader adoption. Can it sign the next ten custodians, the next twenty asset managers? Can it expand beyond the UK without the kind of stumbles that plague cross-border fintech plays? And can it stay ahead of both the legacy vendors—who are not, despite their aging infrastructure, asleep at the wheel—and the wave of well-funded startups coming up behind?
For now, at least, the company has capital, customers, and a clear thesis about where the industry's headed. In a sector where "good enough" has kept legacy systems alive far past their expiration date, that might just be enough.
