TL;DR

A £40m round for 10x Banking has been led by AshGrove Capital, backing the London core-banking platform founded by former Barclays chief executive Antony Jenkins. The company turned EBITDA positive for the first time this year, lifted annual recurring revenue by 30% and signed ten new financial institutions. It last raised in January 2024.

Raising after reaching profitability rather than before it is worth noting in a sector where the reverse is standard. It also means 10x negotiated from a position most of its peers do not have.

Remara and the Co-Operative Bank in New Zealand are among the new customers, with partnerships signed covering South Africa and beyond. Another 500,000 accounts are meant to go live before the year ends, spread across Thailand, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. No valuation was disclosed, which for a round of this size usually means the number was acceptable rather than remarkable. AshGrove joins BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase on the register.

Jenkins’s pitch is that banks are constrained by systems never designed for real-time digital operation, and his framing of the AI opportunity is the sharpest version of the argument: “Every bank wants to be an AI bank, but almost none can be, on a forty-year-old core.” That is a coherent case, and it is also the case every core-banking vendor makes.

The market context supports him more than the marketing does. AshGrove points to Accenture research finding 86% of executives planning to increase generative AI investment in 2025 and 80% expecting the value to beat expectations — while only 34% have scaled AI into a core process. That gap between intent and delivery is precisely where infrastructure vendors earn their money, though it also indicates how many AI banking projects are not working.

For UK fintech the signal is reasonably encouraging. A London company is raising sterling from a European lender against operating results rather than projections, and expanding through Asia-Pacific and Africa rather than defending a domestic niche. It competes on two fronts at once: legacy incumbents — Infosys, Finastra, Temenos — and newer rivals in FIS, Mambu and Thought Machine. Sterling debt-style growth funding for profitable British software firms has been thin, which makes this a useful precedent.

Looking Forward

The 500,000 accounts due to go live this half are the test. Signing institutions is straightforward; migrating live accounts off legacy cores is where core-banking projects historically fail, and 10x now has investor expectations attached to doing it on schedule.