In 2018 a British high-street bank did something large banks almost never do. It put money into a startup that wanted to replace the system at the heart of how a bank counts money.
That startup was Thought Machine, founded in London in 2014 by Paul Taylor. The sources read for this piece say little about Taylor himself. So this is a story about stakes rather than childhood.
By then JPMorgan, Standard Chartered and ING Poland were in the client list.
The stakes were these. A core banking system holds every account, balance and loan. Banks run decades-old versions because replacing them can break everything. Taylor's pitch was cloud-native software, Vault Core, which lets a bank define products with smart contracts. The 2018 Series A of $25M included Lloyds Banking Group, which also became a customer.
What followed was a ladder of bigger cheques. A $125M Series B in 2020 was led by Molten Ventures, Eurazeo, the British Business Bank and SEB. In 2021 came $200M at a $1B valuation, and in 2022 a $160M Series D at $2.7B with Temasek, Intesa Sanpaolo and Morgan Stanley. By then JPMorgan, Standard Chartered and ING Poland were in the client list. Andy Maguire, a former HSBC group COO, became chair in 2020.
The cost of selling to banks is time. Contracts are slow, and a failed migration is public. After the 2022 round the company did not publish a new valuation. Taylor has reportedly said he wants less emphasis on valuation and more on commercial results, and a London listing has been pushed to 2028 at the earliest.
The company says it passed $100M in revenue in 2025, and one outlet reports it turned free cash flow positive in the second half of that year.
The lesson for a founder is narrow but real. When your customers move slowly, one believing early customer can be worth more than a hundred polite meetings. Everything after Lloyds was easier to say yes to.