Goldman Sachs has named Gil Mandelzis, founder and chief government of capital-markets expertise agency Capitolis, amongst its Most Exceptional Entrepreneurs of 2026 on the financial institution’s annual Builders and Innovators Summit in Healdsburg, California. It is the second consecutive yr Mandelzis has obtained the popularity.
The award lands at a busy second for Capitolis. Last week the corporate confirmed $220 million in new financing, together with a $120 million Series E priced at a $1.9 billion valuation. The spherical was backed by a consortium of main monetary establishments: Bank of America, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Citi, J.P. Morgan, Nomura, State Street and UBS. The week earlier than that, Capitolis introduced an all-cash settlement to amass eSecLending for $200 million, a deal the corporate says will lengthen its monetary useful resource administration capabilities and usher in a bigger base of asset-owner purchasers. The firm additionally lately appointed former Bank of America managing director Murugan Manikam as its chief expertise officer.
What Capitolis does
Capitolis positions itself as a expertise layer for steadiness sheet optimisation. It works with international and regional banks in addition to institutional traders to establish and handle capital, funding and liquidity constraints, facilitating the redistribution of threat and capital throughout its community of contributors. In sensible phrases, meaning compressing bilateral exposures, netting portfolios and routing threat to counterparties finest positioned to carry it, thereby releasing up regulatory capital that might in any other case sit idle.
Mandelzis is a serial entrepreneur within the post-trade and markets-infrastructure house. He beforehand based Traiana, a post-trade processing firm that was acquired by ICAP, later rebranded as NEX Group, for $250 million in 2007. He subsequently led EBS BrokerTec, NEX’s overseas change and fixed-income digital markets enterprise, earlier than founding Capitolis in 2017.
Market context and aggressive positioning
Capital optimisation expertise is more and more central to how massive banks handle Basel III and Basel IV constraints, and the section has attracted a variety of specialist suppliers. Capitolis competes in an surroundings the place multilateral netting and portfolio compression are not non-obligatory extras however near-essential instruments for establishments managing leverage ratio and risk-weighted asset flooring. The agency’s shareholder base, which incorporates a number of of the world’s largest banks alongside enterprise capital corporations akin to Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures, offers it an unusually direct distribution benefit: its institutional traders are additionally, in lots of circumstances, its purchasers and counterparties.
The eSecLending acquisition is price watching in that context. Securities lending sits adjoining to Capitolis’s core compression and optimisation enterprise and provides a shopper inhabitants of enormous asset homeowners, together with pension funds and insurance coverage firms, that are inclined to have sticky, long-duration steadiness sheet relationships. Whether the mixing of a securities lending custodial mannequin with a capital-optimisation community creates real operational leverage, or just broadens the product portfolio, would be the take a look at of the deal’s strategic logic.
Goldman Sachs chairman and chief government David Solomon mentioned of the popularity: “As AI reshapes the global landscape, the leaders at Capitolis are proving that agility and vision can be the ultimate competitive advantages.”
Capitolis has appeared on Fortune‘s America’s Most Innovative Companies 2026 record and CNBC‘s World’s Top Fintech Companies record this yr. The firm was based in 2017 and is headquartered in New York.
AI stage 1 of 5: written by Darlyn Ho; AI helped with tone, construction or wording; edited and signed off by Mark Walker, Editorial Director. What the levels mean
