Light Frame raises $5.1M seed to rebuild core banking for private banks

Light Frame, a Lausanne startup that sells core banking and portfolio management software to private banks, has raised a $5.1M seed round led by Fortino Ventures to grow its implementation team and its client base across EMEA.

An oversubscribed seed with seven investors on the cap table

Light Frame announced the round on 10 November 2026 and described it as oversubscribed. Fortino Ventures led. Sidekick Partners, Tenity, Chamaeleon and AltaIR Capital are new investors, and the existing backers Rogue Venture Partners, New Stack Ventures and Studio Alpha took part again.

The company says the money goes to platform development, more implementation and client delivery capacity, and commercial growth that starts in EMEA. Tech Funding News adds hiring in sales and go-to-market, plus more work on security and resilience. Its reporting puts total disclosed funding at $6.8M, including a $1.7M pre-seed in May 2024.

Four founders who ran the legacy system before they replaced it

Light Frame was founded in 2024 in Lausanne. CEO Schuyler Weiss founded and led the Swiss bank Alpian, and Mathieu Clément was its COO and CIO. Philippe Kernevez and Gregory Bataille are the technologists. Tech Funding News counts a core team of just over ten people and about twenty in the wider team.

The product is a cloud-native, API-first platform with embedded AI and an interoperability layer. It is modular, so a bank can buy one component or the full suite. Light Frame partnered with Mambu in June 2025 for core banking services. It names no clients but says it already supports live client operations, mainly at private banks.

Weiss told Tech Funding News what drove the company, describing the legacy core system at Alpian: “It was expensive, slow to change or implement, and we got about half of what we asked for.”

A $12bn software market growing 14% a year

Grand View Research forecasts the wealth management software market at USD 12.07bn by 2030, with 14% annual growth from 2025 (forecast published December 2022, as cited by Tech Funding News on 10 November 2026). That figure covers wealth software as a whole. No reliable sizing exists for the narrower segment of core banking for wealth managers, so treat the $12bn as the ceiling of the addressable pool.

Scale helps here. Temenos reported $880.6M of annual recurring revenue in Q2 2026 (Tech Funding News), which makes it the incumbent Light Frame has to dislodge. In our own database, FintechOS closed a EUR 24.5M debt and equity round led by Santander CIB on 21 September 2026 in the same banking-software vertical. Light Frame’s seed, about EUR 4.55M at the 10 November rate, is under a fifth of that. You can browse every logged round in our fundraising data.

Trust is the product, and the founders already earned some

Replacing a bank’s core system is a sale that asks a lot of the buyer. Hugh Phelan of Fortino Ventures put it this way: “For a bank, moving sensitive data and live operations onto a new platform is an act of trust.” Private banks from Zurich to Luxembourg know that, and the long migration timelines that follow are the first hurdle any newcomer meets.

The silver lining sits in who is selling. Fabian Hediger of Studio Alpha said of the founders: “Most founders pitch the problem. This team had run it.” A buyer who has watched a former bank CEO describe his own migration pain starts the conversation with less to prove. Imagine if the next European private bank to retire a 30-year-old core picks a Lausanne module over a US suite.

What to watch is concrete. The first named client will show whether the modular pitch wins single components or full replacements. The Mambu link will show how far Light Frame leans on partners for core banking services. The EMEA sales hires will show how fast a four-founder team can build a go-to-market motion. The opportunity is clear, and Swiss builders are the ones writing it.