Capitolis CEO Gil Mandelzis Wins Goldman Sachs Top Entrepreneur Honor Again

Goldman Sachs has named Gil Mandelzis, founder and CEO of capital-markets technology firm Capitolis, among its Most Exceptional Entrepreneurs of 2026 — the second consecutive year he has received the recognition. The bank announced the honor at its annual Builders and Innovators Summit in Healdsburg, California.

The award lands at a busy moment for the company. Last week, Capitolis confirmed $220 million in new financing, including a $120 million Series E priced at a $1.9 billion valuation. That valuation puts the New York-based firm, founded in 2017, close to the two-billion-dollar mark — rarified air for a post-trade infrastructure specialist.

The investor list matters as much as the number. The round drew a consortium of major financial institutions: Bank of America, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Citi, J.P. Morgan, Nomura, State Street and UBS. In other words, eight of the banks that grapple daily with capital and liquidity constraints are now underwriting the company that sells them tools to manage those constraints.

There's more deal news stacked behind the raise. The week before the financing, Capitolis announced an all-cash agreement to acquire eSecLending for $200 million. The company says the deal will extend its financial resource management capabilities and bring in a larger base of asset-owner clients. Capitolis has also recently appointed Murugan Manikam, a former Bank of America managing director, as its chief technology officer.

What does Capitolis actually do?

Capitolis positions itself as a technology layer for balance sheet optimisation. It works with global and regional banks and 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. The result: regulatory capital that would otherwise sit idle gets freed up. Under Basel III and Basel IV rules, where leverage ratio and risk-weighted asset floors bite hardest, multilateral netting and portfolio compression have shifted from optional extras to near-essential tools.

Who is Gil Mandelzis?

Mandelzis is a serial entrepreneur in the post-trade and markets-infrastructure space. He previously founded Traiana, a post-trade processing company acquired by ICAP — later rebranded as NEX Group — for $250 million in 2007. He then led EBS BrokerTec, NEX's foreign exchange and fixed-income electronic markets business, before founding Capitolis in 2017.

His track record gives the Goldman recognition some substance beyond the usual summit ceremony. Goldman Sachs chairman and CEO David Solomon said of the award: "As AI reshapes the global landscape, the leaders at Capitolis are proving that agility and vision can be the ultimate competitive advantages."

What does this change for practitioners?

For banks and institutional investors, the most consequential item here isn't the trophy — it's the eSecLending acquisition. Securities lending sits adjacent to Capitolis's core compression and optimisation business, and it adds a client population of large asset owners, including pension funds and insurance companies, that tend to have sticky, long-duration balance sheet relationships.

The strategic test will be integration. Whether combining a securities lending custodial model with a capital-optimisation network creates genuine operational leverage, or simply broadens the product portfolio, determines whether that $200 million was well spent.

The shareholder base adds another wrinkle. Alongside the bank consortium, Capitolis counts venture firms Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures among its investors. Its institutional shareholders are also, in many cases, its clients and counterparties — an unusually direct distribution advantage in a segment crowded with specialist providers.

Recognition has been stacking up beyond Goldman's summit. Capitolis has appeared on Fortune's America's Most Innovative Companies 2026 list and CNBC's World's Top Fintech Companies list this year.

Watch the next two quarters. The eSecLending integration, the new CTO's first product decisions, and how quickly the Series E capital gets deployed will tell you whether Capitolis is building a genuine markets-infrastructure platform or an acquisitive roll-up with an impressive cap table.