TreasurySpring

TreasurySpring was founded in 2016 by Kevin Cook (CEO), Matthew Longhurst (COO) and James Skillen (CTO). Our three co-founders met working in a hedge fund in 2006, where they were trading a mix of illiquid short-dated fixed income, pre, during and post-Lehman. In 2008, the fund managers shut down the business, finding liquidity where they could to return capital to investors. At the same time, Henry Adams, our CPO, was trading at the Royal Bank of Canada on a repo desk, which also had significant exposure to Lehman Brothers. However, Henry’s exposure was through the repo market, and fully collateralised, allowing him to reverse his trades and retain his collateral, even turning a profit on his book.

The three co-founders left the hedge fund and in 2010 met a founder of a $35bn hedge fund. He had a challenge – the fund was sitting on $10bn of excess cash but was unsure how to earn interest on this cash overnight without credit risk. The co-founders started advising this hedge fund on how to build out a best-in-class post-financial crisis cash investment strategy. They built out an advisory business from this, Autumn Capital Partners, principally working with hedge funds and other non-bank financial institutions.

Having reached $30bn in assets under advice at Autumn, they sold the advisory business to a London-based asset manager, where they ran short-dated fixed-income separately managed accounts. They noticed an opportunity – people wanted something simple that they could buy to help manage their cash, that was standardised and regulated. The team knew everything required to build a top-tier cash investment strategy and wanted to find a way to democratise this access, to give businesses access to money markets without them having to put in place any infrastructure themselves.

The co-founders had the idea of creating an asset transformation wrapper, which would transform the asset someone wanted to buy into something they could buy, but as a standardised and regulated asset. They were bringing the broadest range of the best risk-adjusted cash investment products to the broadest range of clients. On one side, they could put in place all the complicated heterogeneous financial infrastructure to connect to different counterparties. And on the other side, the client is buying a standardised, regulated financial instrument. They spent 18 months talking to lawyers, accountants, regulators, and investors to figure out how to do this and in 2016, TreasurySpring was born.

The co-founders raised a little bit of funding in 2017, followed by a pre-seed round by Black Lion. The co-founders got introduced to Henry, who immediately understood what they were doing and was brought on as Chief Product Officer.

In June 2018, TreasurySpring issued the first-ever fixed-term fund for £100,000 worth of UK treasury bills. Followed by the build-out of the tri-party infrastructure to be able to access the repo market, which is our core USP, as well as access to all of the other obligors that have made our product range so broad.

ETFS Capital led the seed round in 2019, MMC and Anthemis co-led the Series A in 2021, and Balderton Capital led the Series B in 2023, with participation from Mubadala Capital Ventures.

Today we’re a tech company, having built out a front-end tech platform that provides our clients access to all our obligors through Fixed-Term Funds (FTFs). We currently serve over 500+ clients spanning from seed-stage to FTSE100 listed companies, PE and VC funds, and more.