Anton Padmasiri co-founded WealthOS, a cloud-native wealth management platform, to fix the outdated technology global financial institutions were still running on, and sold it to the world’s largest bank.
In late 2025, JPMorgan opened a tender to update the technology running its pension operations. WealthOS entered and won the bid. Barclays, a competing bank, had already invested in WealthOS and held a board seat at the time. JPMorgan liked what it saw so much that it offered a buyout in January 2026. Padmasiri took it. The sum was undisclosed.
Why were two of the biggest banks so keen on this startup? WealthOS built a cloud-native platform that allows financial institutions to manage pension and wealth products, replacing the server-based systems most still rely on today. Padmasiri spent seven years at Fidelity International, one of the world’s largest investment companies, before leaving in 2018 to build WealthOS. The broader industry, he said at a founders event in Colombo called Spike, was running on software he described as “on-prem, monolithic and API-less.”
At Fidelity, for example, any change to a product meant working through layers of servers, databases, and pipelines, making even the simplest improvement a months-long ordeal. “Infrastructure got in the way. Releases got in the way. As a product manager thinking about the end customer, I had little or no control,” he told the audience.
Therefore, he wanted to build a product that solved four problems. Wealth platforms were not cloud-native. They ran on fragmented systems. They were closed off from external software. And only professional engineers could use them with other tools. The product he built addressed all four. ‘When you look at the designs we did six years ago and when you look at the product now,’ he said, “the pivot is almost non-existent.”
He couldn’t have done it alone. His co-founder, Chamath Arambewela, brought experience in enterprise software delivery at tier-one institutions such as Borsa Italiana and Oslo Bors, and working at the London Stock Exchange Group, complementing Padmasiri’s background in product management. “Find the skill gap,” Padmasiri told the Colombo audience, referring to identifying the perfect partner.
Padmasiri put together a five-page pitch on A4 paper, went to friends and family for his first money, and told them upfront they would probably never see it again.
Together, they built the first working version of WealthOS by 2022, with the first paying client signing in November 2023. Along the way, Barclays accepted WealthOS into its Rise Growth Academy, a programme for early-stage startups. Out of about 50 companies in the programme, WealthOS was the only one Barclays chose to back.
It almost came crashing down at one point. In the latter half of 2023, Barclays had issued a term sheet, a conditional agreement to invest that had not yet translated into cash. “In any other year, I could have taken that term sheet and gotten five other term sheets to fill my round,” Padmasiri said. Some European investors disappeared in August. Towards the end of the year, he only had ‘£1,000 left and 35 people on payroll.’ The sleepless nights were real. He was transparent with his team throughout. They stood by him.
At some point during those months, he and his wife sent their daughters to stay with family in New York. They had a difficult conversation to have. “Do we pull the girls out of school?” he said.
“Even in the darkest and most difficult time,” he said, “when you wake up, do you feel like you want to be doing that? If the answer is yes, that is the signal.” For him, it always was. When doubt crept in, he would call senior contacts in the industry. “You have to be straight,” he would tell them. “How much of this is real? How much of it is me basically clutching straws?” His investors were equally direct. “You’ve got something,” they told him. “You’ve just got to keep going.”
Padmasiri built WealthOS during the COVID years, working from his study while his daughters learned from home. He pitched to investors repeatedly from his desk, regularly using the word sandbox, basically where software is tested before it goes live. His daughters, overhearing the same pitch day after day, began mimicking him. “Daddy’s playing in the sandbox again,” they would say. “It grounds you,” he said.
“You’ve Just Got To Keep Going.”
In a follow-up conversation with Echelon, he spoke about what founders building today should do differently. The market feels saturated, he said, only because founders follow what gets reported. “What gets reported in the news shouldn’t be your view of what startups do,” he said. The real white space sits in the unsexy corners of industries that everyone assumes are already solved, where people are still running critical operations on spreadsheets.
Five lessons emerge from the WealthOS story for founders paying attention. Fall in love with the problem, not the solution. Find your skill gap before you find your co-founder. Be transparent with your team long before the difficult conversations arrive. Product market fit is not the finish line. It is the moment you discover whether your money runs out before your customers convert. And the white space is always there. It just rarely makes the news.
He now remains CEO of WealthOS inside JPMorgan, contributing to the bank’s broader wealth management strategy. Whether he’ll build again, he would not say. “You’ve just got to keep going,” he told the room of founders in Colombo. He did.