Tony
Mackenzie

Picture the operations room of one of Australia's largest institutional fund managers. Billions of dollars moving across asset classes. Sophisticated risk models. Decades of accumulated expertise. And at the centre of it all, humming along in the background: Excel spreadsheets.

Tony Mackenzie noticed. As Chief Strategist at QIC (Queensland Investment Corporation), he was responsible for the investment strategy behind more than $45 billion in client assets - super funds, sovereign wealth, institutional capital. The calibre of the people was exceptional. The tools they were forced to work with were not.

"Investment professionals are on the cusp of a transformation that will rival and surpass the spreadsheet revolution of the 1980s," Mackenzie has said. That wasn't prediction. It was a plan.

In 2014, he packed up his family and moved from Brisbane to San Francisco - not because it was comfortable, but because it was the right place to build the company he had in mind. The company became Jacobi. The problem it set out to solve was the one Mackenzie had stared at for years: multi-asset portfolio management was still being run on infrastructure designed for a different era, stitched together with spreadsheets and goodwill.

What makes the origin story unusual is not that a finance professional spotted a technology gap - that happens constantly. What is unusual is the depth from which Mackenzie came at it. His PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of Southern Queensland gave him a foundation that few investment professionals and fewer tech founders share. He is not a technologist who learned about finance or a financier who hired technologists. He arrived at the intersection of both and built something that speaks both languages natively.

At QIC, he rose through roles - Senior Portfolio Manager to Head of Portfolio Design to Chief Strategist - accumulating the practitioner's intuition that no amount of academic study can replicate. He knew what the tools needed to do because he had needed them himself. That specificity is what Jacobi carries into every product decision.

Institutional investment management has a technology problem that predates most of the people working in it. Asset managers built workflows around single-asset-class tools in the 1990s. Multi-asset strategies multiplied. The tools did not. The gap was filled, imperfectly and expensively, with spreadsheets, manual processes, and bespoke internal builds that required maintenance armies to sustain.

Jacobi is the enterprise infrastructure layer that replaces that patchwork. The platform handles multi-asset portfolio design, ex-ante and ex-post analytics, scenario analysis, risk management, model portfolio management, and client reporting - end to end. It connects to a firm's existing data sources and proprietary models rather than forcing clients into pre-packaged risk frameworks they didn't build and don't fully trust.

The key word in Jacobi's vocabulary is "open architecture." Investment management has a long tradition of firms protecting competitive advantage through proprietary data and analytics. Mackenzie built Jacobi to amplify that, not replace it. The platform can ingest a client's own factor models, custom data schemas, and internal code. T. Rowe Price can run T. Rowe Price's analytics. Franklin Templeton can run Franklin Templeton's. The infrastructure is shared; the intellectual capital is not.

It is a philosophically different bet from most enterprise software, which tends to lock customers into its own models over time. Jacobi's wager is that the best clients - the ones with the most to spend and the most to protect - will pay precisely because they do not have to surrender their edge to use it.

That philosophy is why the Series A told a story within a story. The $10 million round closed in September 2022, led by QIC - the firm where Mackenzie spent a decade before leaving to disrupt what he saw there. His former employer backed his startup. It is either a profound endorsement or a very awkward board meeting, probably both. Joining QIC in the round were Illuminate Venture Partners, 8VC, and Western Technology Investment, with Crystal Russell from QIC and Bill Miller of Makena Capital joining the board.

Mackenzie's academic background is not a biographical footnote - it is the substrate on which Jacobi runs. A PhD in Applied Mathematics, completed at the University of Southern Queensland between 1999 and 2003, focused on computational approaches that would later find a direct application in portfolio construction. Most CEOs of investment technology companies are either former bankers or former engineers. Mackenzie is a former quant who became an investment strategist who became a founder. The overlap is genuinely rare.

The years at QIC gave him something equally valuable: failure data. Not his own - but a front-row seat to the failure modes of institutional investing infrastructure at scale. He watched large, sophisticated firms work around their own tools. He saw where decisions got made in spreadsheets when they shouldn't have been. He observed the manual work required to connect analytics pipelines that should have been automated a decade earlier. By the time he founded Jacobi, he was not solving a theoretical problem. He was solving the specific, painful, expensive problems he had watched accumulate over ten years of practice.

The decision to plant the company in San Francisco rather than Sydney or Brisbane was deliberate. Enterprise software needs proximity to the capital markets and the talent networks that finance it. It also needs proximity to the type of technical recruits who can build it. San Francisco has both, at a density that Brisbane cannot match. The relocation of his family was the proof of conviction.

In February 2026, Jacobi announced a suite of AI-assisted coding resources designed to help investment teams build custom analytics and applications within the Jacobi environment. The launch reflects where Mackenzie is taking the platform: toward a world where investment professionals who are not software engineers can still write and deploy their own analytical tools.

The positioning is careful and characteristically practical. "Our AI-assisted coding resources are not designed to replace investment expertise, but to empower it," Mackenzie said at the launch. "By providing a secure environment for custom analytics and applications, we remove the trade-off between in-house flexibility and enterprise-grade security."

That trade-off has historically been brutal for asset managers. Build it yourself and you get exactly what you want but you are also now a software company, which is not what you hired for. Buy it off the shelf and you get security and maintenance but you surrender the custom logic that separates your process from every other firm using the same vendor. Jacobi's AI tools are a bid to dissolve that binary - giving investment professionals the ability to express proprietary logic in code, supported by AI assistance, within a governed and secured environment.

The company has also been expanding its partnership ecosystem. A 2026 partnership with Charles River opened Jacobi's analytics to Charles River's order and portfolio management client base. The earlier integration with Axioma, the risk analytics specialist acquired by SimCorp, extended Jacobi's reach into bottom-up risk attribution that complements its top-down portfolio construction strength.

The trajectory Mackenzie is mapping positions Jacobi not just as an analytics vendor but as the operating layer through which investment teams express, govern, and scale their investment processes. If the spreadsheet was the first revolution in investment workflow - and it was, in the 1980s - Jacobi is betting it will be present for the second one.

The company serves over $7 trillion in assets under management across its client base. It has 140 employees spread across San Francisco, London, and Brisbane. It generates $10 million or more in annual revenue and has raised $27.6 million in total. By the metrics of enterprise fintech, it is mid-stage. By the ambition of its founder and the size of the market it is targeting, it is still early.