For Lior Yogev, the urgent problem in fund technology is not that asset managers lack data. It is that too much of the industry is still trying to run tomorrow’s portfolios on yesterday’s plumbing.
The CEO and co-founder of FundGuard, launched in 2018, describes the firm as a technology provider for asset managers or servicers.
The New York based firm wants to become what Yogev calls “the single source of truth” for investment portfolios: a cloud-native, AI-enabled investment accounting system of record for funds, used by asset managers, asset owners, fund administrators and custody banks.
The company began with a narrower proposition. In its early years FundGuard sold a contingency and oversight tool for NAV calculation and production, a back-up system intended to protect mutual funds and ETFs if a primary platform failed.
That focus was born from a real industry weakness: legacy fund-accounting systems had suffered outages, forcing institutions to calculate valuations manually and increasing the risk of error.
Once FundGuard proved its system could run in production, Yogev says larger institutions began asking whether it could replace their legacy infrastructure altogether.
That is now the heart of FundGuard’s value. FundGuard offers SaaS software delivered over Amazon Web Services
and Microsoft Azure. Its platform connects to market data sources, ingests fund transactions, maintains holdings,
performs accounting and valuations, and supports workflows across the front, middle and back office.
Its capabilities include real-time investment accounting for all books of record, NAV oversight and contingency,
ETF basket management and a growing private markets accounting offering – all on the same platform.
The timing of FundGuard’s arrival on the market could not have been better, with Yogev arguing that systems still used by many asset managers and servicers are now 30, 40 or even 50 years old.
Relying as they often do on overnight batch processes, fragmented data models and on-premise architecture, most were not designed for a world in which portfolios combine listed securities, derivatives, private credit, private equity and digital assets. Nor for markets that operate close to 24 hours a day.
“In the past you could do things in different systems and then report them together,” Yogev says. That model, he
argues, is becoming unsustainable. Investors want richer and timelier information; regulators want resilience and control; asset managers face fee pressure while trading volumes, asset complexity and operational risk increase. “People need to do so much more with less.”
FundGuard’s answer is real-time data, unified workflows and automation. Yogev says the platform was built “API [a software interface] first” and with AI in mind from day one, before the latest wave of generative AI. The aim is not novelty, but anomaly detection, automation, reduced operational risk and better use of financial and operational data.
The rise of agentic AI, in Yogev’s view, is accelerating the need for modernisation. Large asset managers and banks are experimenting with AI agents, but those agents need accurate, real-time access to systems of record.
“If you don’t have systems of record you can work with in real time, through APIs, you’re just not going to be able to compete in the long run.”
Resilience is another theme. ForEurop ean firms, regulatory expectations including the EU’s Digital Operational
Resilience Act (Dora) are pushing operational continuity from an IT issue to a board-level concern.
Yogev says firms are increasingly evaluating infrastructure for transparency, control, recoverability and business continuity. Cloud-native platforms, he argues, offer higher availability and scalability than legacy technology.
FundGuard remains privately owned. Aside from its New York headquarters, it has a significant engineering base in Tel Aviv , as well as operations in Boston, Toronto, London and Dublin.
The company employs more than 150 people and says it has raised more than $150 million from venture, growth
and strategic investors, including Citi, State Street and Hamilton Lane.
FundGuard started in North America before expanding in Europe, and Yogev expects Asia-Pacific offices, potentially in Singapore or Australia, to follow around 2027. He sees opportunities in wealth management and other bank businesses, but says the company is moving carefully. “Focus is important,” he says.
Private markets are now a bigger part of that focus. FundGuard initially targeted public-market funds, but Yogev says portfolio convergence is changing the opportunity. Asset managers increasingly want one platform that can support public and private assets together, and the company has grown its commercial team to include private equity and private credit expertise. Growth in that segment, he says, is likely over the next 12 months.
What differentiates FundGuard, according to Yogev, is the combination of public and private markets support, real-time 24/7 operation, multiple books and views of the same portfolio, API-first design, cloud architecture and
embedded AI.
The platform also includes workflow, exception management, reconciliation, reporting, dashboards and data connections to Snowflake and Databricks. Over time, he expects FundGuard to expand into performance, attribution and compliance.
Outside work, the 49-year-old father of two is a basketball fan, a Boston Celtics supporter and a twice-weekly tennis player, though building a global fintech leaves limited spare time. If the industry’s future depends on real-time data, resilient platforms and AI-ready infrastructure, FundGuard wants to supply the court on which it is played.
Explore the platform displacing legacy technology with a modern system of record. See FundGuard in action.
