Goldman Sachs has named Gil Mandelzis, the founder and chief executive officer of capital-markets technology firm Capitolis, among its Most Exceptional Entrepreneurs of 2026. The distinction was awarded during the investment bank’s annual Builders and Innovators Summit held in Healdsburg, California. For Mandelzis, this marks the second consecutive year he has received the recognition, underscoring his enduring influence on financial technology and market infrastructure.
The accolade arrives during an exceptionally active and transformative period for Capitolis. Just last week, the company confirmed a massive $220 million capital injection, headlined by a $120 million Series E funding round priced at a towering $1.9 billion valuation. This financing round attracted an impressive consortium of major global financial institutions, including Bank of America, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Citi, J.P. Morgan, Nomura, State Street, and UBS.
This financial milestone followed closely on the heels of another major corporate announcement: an all-cash agreement by Capitolis to acquire eSecLending for $200 million. According to leadership at Capitolis, this strategic acquisition is designed to substantially extend the company’s financial resource management capabilities while simultaneously expanding its footprint by bringing in a significantly larger base of asset-owner clients. To support this rapid scale-up, Capitolis recently appointed Murugan Manikam, a former managing director at Bank of America, as its new chief technology officer.
What Capitolis Does
To understand the weight of these developments, it is necessary to examine the core function of Capitolis within the global financial ecosystem. The company positions itself as an advanced technology layer dedicated entirely to balance sheet optimization. It works collaboratively with both global and regional banks, as well as a broad array of institutional investors, to identify and address complex capital, funding, and liquidity constraints. By doing so, Capitolis facilitates the efficient redistribution of risk and capital across its vast network of participating institutions.
In practical terms, this operational mechanism involves compressing bilateral exposures, netting complex portfolios, and intelligently routing risk to counterparties that are best positioned to hold it. By streamlining these processes, Capitolis successfully frees up valuable regulatory capital that would otherwise remain tied up and idle on bank balance sheets.
Gil Mandelzis is widely recognized as a serial entrepreneur who has left a permanent mark on the post-trade and markets-infrastructure space. Before launching Capitolis in 2017, Mandelzis founded Traiana, a prominent post-trade processing company that was successfully acquired by ICAP—later rebranded as NEX Group—for $250 million back in 2007. Following that successful exit, he went on to lead EBS BrokerTec, which served as NEX’s core foreign exchange and fixed-income electronic markets business, before eventually embarking on his latest entrepreneurial venture with Capitolis.
Market Context and Competitive Positioning
Capital optimization technology has become increasingly central to the daily operations of large financial institutions, particularly as they navigate stringent regulatory requirements like Basel III and Basel IV constraints. Consequently, this specific market segment has attracted a wide variety of specialist providers. Capitolis operates in an environment where multilateral netting and portfolio compression are no longer regarded as optional extras, but rather as near-essential tools for institutions struggling to manage leverage ratios and risk-weighted asset floors.
A key differentiator for Capitolis has been its unique shareholder base. The firm is backed not only by traditional venture capital heavyweights such as Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and Index Ventures, but also by several of the world’s largest banks. This dual backing provides Capitolis with an unusually direct distribution advantage: many of its institutional investors also function as its primary clients and active counterparties.
The upcoming integration of eSecLending must be viewed through this strategic lens. Securities lending sits directly adjacent to the core compression and optimization business that Capitolis has built. The acquisition introduces a robust client population of large asset owners, including major pension funds and insurance companies, which typically maintain sticky, long-duration relationships with their balance sheets. Whether the integration of a securities lending custodial model with a sophisticated capital-optimisation network will generate genuine operational leverage or simply broaden the firm’s existing product portfolio remains one of the most compelling strategic questions for market observers.
Commenting on the entrepreneurial recognition, Goldman Sachs Chairman and Chief Executive David Solomon remarked that as artificial intelligence continues to reshape the global landscape, leaders like those at Capitolis are demonstrating how agility and vision can serve as the ultimate competitive advantages.
This recognition adds to a growing list of accolades for the New York-headquartered fintech firm in 2026. Earlier this year, Capitolis earned spots on Fortune’s America’s Most Innovative Companies list and CNBC’s World’s Top Fintech Companies list, further cementing its trajectory as a major force in modern financial market infrastructure.
