The most revealing number in 10x Banking’s £40 million raise is not the £40 million. It is how closely it matches what Thought Machine took in a month earlier — roughly £30 million from a single tier-one bank. Two of the most credentialled cloud core banking vendors in the market have now each raised the price of a mid-size Series A, in a sector whose last cycle produced a $160 million round at a $2.7 billion valuation and a $266 million Series E at $5.5 billion for Mambu. The category did not get smaller. Its financing did.
10x Banking, founded by former Barclays chief executive Antony Jenkins, announced on August 4, 2026 that it had secured £40 million ($53.9 million) from AshGrove Capital. The capital is structured as a combination of debt and equity, and it is the company’s first external raise since January 2024. That structure is the tell. A profitable company that wanted a headline valuation would have priced an equity round; a profitable company that suspects the market would mark it below its last mark takes structured capital instead and keeps the number private.
Profitability first, capital second
The operational case is genuinely strong. 10x Banking turned EBITDA-positive over the past 12 months and has sustained it into 2026. Across the same period it passed 10 million live customer accounts, onboarded more than 10 new financial institutions, and lifted annual recurring revenue (ARR) by more than 30%. Its client list — Westpac, Chase UK, West Brom Building Society and Old Mutual — is the kind of roster that takes core banking vendors the better part of a decade to assemble.
“Financial institutions have a clear ambition to innovate, but many remain constrained by infrastructure that was not built for real-time, digital banking,” said Antony Jenkins CBE, Founder, Chair and Chief Executive Officer of 10x Banking.
Nadir Guessoum, Chief Financial Officer at 10x Banking, framed the raise in balance-sheet rather than growth terms: “We are thrilled to partner with AshGrove, with their investment strengthening our balance sheet and supporting our strategic growth priorities.”
What the rest of the cohort is doing
The peer set has spent 2026 buying capability rather than raising against it. Temenos acquired additiv in an embedded-wealth orchestration push in June, and Backbase bought Kasisto to bring agentic artificial intelligence (AI) into the core the same month. Meanwhile the incumbents’ own customers are routing around the vendor question entirely: Intesa Sanpaolo moved its Italian core banking onto Google Cloud in July, a reminder that “cloud-native core” is a destination banks can reach through a hyperscaler as well as through a licensed platform.
Thought Machine’s position illustrates the valuation problem more precisely than 10x’s does. Its revenue passed $100 million for the first time this year — a genuine milestone — yet Molten Ventures cut the carrying value of its stake by close to 40% between March and September 2024 before revising it upward again. Revenue growth and mark-to-market value have decoupled in this category, and both companies are now financing around that gap rather than through it.
“10x Banking has built one of the most compelling technology platforms in core banking today,” said Phil Fretwell, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of AshGrove Capital. AshGrove is a growth-debt specialist, which is consistent with the read: this is lender diligence on recurring revenue, not venture diligence on a multiple.
Why the smaller raise may be the healthier one
Core banking replacement is a long-cycle, reference-driven sale. A bank choosing a platform is underwriting a 10-year dependency, and vendor solvency is part of the diligence. Under those conditions, a vendor that has proved it can fund itself is a materially safer counterparty than one burning $100 million a year against a valuation it has to grow into. The 2021 cohort raised enormous rounds precisely because the sales cycle was slower than the funding cycle allowed. That mismatch is what produced the markdowns.
Expect the pattern to continue through 2027: profitable infrastructure vendors raising modest structured facilities, unprofitable ones consolidating into strategics like Temenos and Backbase, and the valuation reset staying largely invisible because almost nobody in this cohort will price an equity round if they can avoid it. The read-across for adjacent verticals is direct — as Ambrook’s $30 million Series B showed last week, the money in business-to-business (B2B) fintech is flowing to demonstrated unit economics, not to total addressable market (TAM) slides.
Rick Steves
Rick Steves has seen business and economics through many lenses. He joined the financial services industry in 2009, and has been a financial journalist since 2011. He holds a degree in Business Administration and has experience producing real-time news, from both buy-side and sell-side, as well as for retail traders, brokers and service providers. Steves' work has appeared in a variety of online publications including FX Street, NewsBTC, FinanceFeeds, and The Industry Spread. Rick has great interest in the dynamics of the trading industry. The never-ending clash between technology, economics, regulation, and more importantly, the people.
