MDOTM lands $27M led by Expedition Growth Capital for Sphere AI

A growth round inside wealth-tech is the kind of headline most readers scroll past, but where the money is going inside a financial institution this time is worth a closer look. Axios reported that London-founded MDOTM has closed a $27 million growth equity round led by Expedition Growth Capital, taking total investment in the company to $36.5 million.

MDOTM's product is Sphere, an AI investment platform aimed at the part of asset and wealth management that handles portfolio construction and rebalancing. The company says Sphere now supports more than $100 billion in assets across 60+ financial institutions, with named clients including Morgan Stanley, Amundi and Zurich Bank. The firm was founded in London in 2015 and runs offices in London, New York and Milan.

The pitch from CEO Tommaso Migliore is that buyers have moved past the question of whether to use AI in investment decisions and are now wrestling with how to deploy it across thousands of portfolios while keeping control. The investor framing is more pointed: financial institutions have spent the last decade buying back-office and front-end software, the line goes, but the work in the middle still happens in spreadsheets. Steve Twomey, a partner at Expedition Growth Capital, and James Hays, formerly CEO at Wells Fargo Advisors, are joining the board alongside the round.

The honest caveat is what the announcement does not give you. There is no revenue figure, no disclosed valuation, and no head-to-head against the bigger incumbents in portfolio analytics. The $100 billion in assets is what runs through the platform, not what MDOTM itself manages, and the split across those 60+ institutions is not broken out.

What is worth watching is whether Sphere can convert that institutional footprint into the US wealth-distribution channel, where fee compression on advisor books is most acute and where Hays's wirehouse background most obviously points. That, more than the headline dollars, is the test of whether this round was capital for hiring or capital for a real geographic expansion.