Goldman Sachs has named Gil Mandelzis, founder and chief executive of capital-markets technology firm Capitolis, among its Most Exceptional Entrepreneurs of 2026 at the bank’s annual Builders and Innovators Summit in Healdsburg, California. It is the second consecutive year Mandelzis has received the recognition.
The award lands at a busy moment for Capitolis. Last week the company confirmed $220 million in new financing, including a $120 million Series E priced at a $1.9 billion valuation. The round was backed by a consortium of major financial institutions: Bank of America, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Citi, J.P. Morgan, Nomura, State Street and UBS. The week before that, Capitolis announced an all-cash agreement to acquire eSecLending for $200 million, a deal the company says will extend its financial resource management capabilities and bring in a larger base of asset-owner clients. The company also recently appointed former Bank of America managing director Murugan Manikam as its chief technology officer.
What Capitolis does
Capitolis positions itself as a technology layer for balance sheet optimisation. It works with global and regional banks as well as institutional investors to identify and address capital, funding and liquidity constraints, facilitating the redistribution of risk and capital across its network of participants. In practical terms, that means compressing bilateral exposures, netting portfolios and routing risk to counterparties best placed to hold it, thereby freeing up regulatory capital that would otherwise sit idle.
Mandelzis is a serial entrepreneur in the post-trade and markets-infrastructure space. He previously founded Traiana, a post-trade processing company that was acquired by ICAP, later rebranded as NEX Group, for $250 million in 2007. He subsequently led EBS BrokerTec, NEX’s foreign exchange and fixed-income electronic markets business, before founding Capitolis in 2017.
Market context and competitive positioning
Capital optimisation technology is increasingly central to how large banks manage Basel III and Basel IV constraints, and the segment has attracted a range of specialist providers. Capitolis competes in an environment where multilateral netting and portfolio compression are no longer optional extras but near-essential tools for institutions managing leverage ratio and risk-weighted asset floors. The firm’s shareholder base, which includes several of the world’s largest banks alongside venture capital firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures, gives it an unusually direct distribution advantage: its institutional investors are also, in many cases, its clients and counterparties.
The eSecLending acquisition is worth watching in that context. Securities lending sits adjacent to Capitolis’s core compression and optimisation business and adds a client population of large asset owners, including pension funds and insurance companies, that tend to have sticky, long-duration balance sheet relationships. Whether the integration of a securities lending custodial model with a capital-optimisation network creates genuine operational leverage, or simply broadens the product portfolio, will be the test of the deal’s strategic logic.
Goldman Sachs chairman and chief executive David Solomon said of the recognition: “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 list and CNBC‘s World’s Top Fintech Companies list this year. The company was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in New York.
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