Citi Ventures Invests in Core Banking Provider Tuum

Citi Ventures has become a strategic investor in Tuum in an extension to the Series B funding round Tuum announced in February.

Together with its investment, Citi Ventures will introduce Tuum to key stakeholders within Citi, the bank, to explore commercialization opportunities, Tuum said in a Thursday (March 14) press release.

“This investment from one of the largest banking groups in the world, with market-leading positions globally in corporate, private and retail banking, represents a major milestone as well as a significant market endorsement of what Tuum has achieved,” Myles Bertrand, CEO of Tuum, said in the release.

Tuum, a core banking provider, aims to help banks replace their legacy systems quickly and safely; lower their maintenance costs; and capitalize on the potential of digitalization, according to the release.

The company announced its Series B funding round of $26 million in February. The Estonian company said at the time that the funding will allow it to target new territories in central and southern Europe and the Middle East, enhance its direct sales and marketing operations, and form new managed service relationships.

Tuum’s newest investor, Citi Ventures, acts as a strategic investor on behalf of Citi, according to the Thursday press release. Citi Ventures works to “catalyze innovation” at the bank by investing in and partnering with startups in the financial services space.

“At Citi Ventures, we have been tracking the modernization of core banking tech stacks for years,” Luis Valdich, a managing director at Citi Ventures, said in the release. “After exploring numerous opportunities to invest in next-gen core banking providers, we are excited to invest in Tuum, whose API-first, cloud-agnostic and modular platform promises to strike an optimal balance between no-code hyper-configurability and total cost of ownership that can help accelerate this long overdue transformation across the industry.”

In another recent development, U.K. licensed bank LHV Bank said in September 2023 that it partnered with Tuum to transition to a cloud-based banking system.

“This collaboration aligns with our sentiment to use value-adding technology partners to deliver the best client-facing offering,” LHV Bank said in a Sept. 7 post on LinkedIn announcing the collaboration.