Thought Machine crosses $100M revenue and delays its London IPO to 2028

Most tech founders chase a bigger valuation. Thought Machine’s boss would rather talk about revenue, and he has just crossed a milestone worth boasting about.

The London core-banking company has passed $100m in annual revenue for the first time, tech.eu reported. It also took a fresh £30m ($41m) from a “tier 1” bank, and pushed any stock market listing out to at least 2028. The figures come from its latest results.

Revenue over valuation

Thought Machine builds cloud software that runs the plumbing of a bank: accounts, payments, and the ledger underneath. Lenders pay a usage fee based on how many accounts sit on its Vault platform. Revenue rose 57 per cent in 2025, and annual recurring revenue crossed $100m in mid-2026.

The firm also turned free cash flow positive in the second half of last year.

Founder Paul Taylor is pointedly relaxed about what the company is worth. “We are trying to put less emphasis on valuation and more emphasis on commercial success,” he said. He declined to give a new figure.

Thought Machine was valued at $2.7bn back in 2022. It competes with core-banking challengers such as Starling’s Engine, Mambu and 10x.

A small raise, a big client list

The £30m is modest by fintech standards, and it comes from a bank that is also a customer. That is the pattern here. Many of its backers, including Lloyds, ING and Standard Chartered, are also clients. The company says it now works with 18 of the world’s largest banks and has signed 68 in total. Investors keep pouring into banking software more widely.

The progress is real, but so was the pain. Thought Machine cut its losses from around £70m to roughly £12m in the period. Costs stayed flat while revenue climbed, helped by ever-larger deals. It employs about 530 people, and plans to add more than 100 engineers in 2026 across London and a new Lisbon office.

Flying which flag?

For a company held up as a British champion, Thought Machine is strikingly un-British in its sales. Only about 15 per cent of revenue comes from the UK. The United States is now its biggest market, with offices in New York and Miami, followed by Australia and Latin America.

That tension runs through Taylor’s listing plans. He would “love to get the London stock market going again,” but calls conditions “difficult” after five years in the doldrums. So a float waits until 2028 at the earliest, joining a queue of European fintechs long rumoured to be heading public.

Others are simply holding off too. For now, Taylor is betting that steady revenue, not a headline number, is the better story. And that a bank will judge a supplier the same way.