Indices are the underlying for a wide range of investment and trading products, yet much of the technology used to design, calculate and distribute them is, in some instances, more than 20 years old. For Tobias Sproehnle, CEO and co-founder of London-based PANTA, that gap is the opportunity.

In this Founders on the Record interview with Dedale Intelligence, Sproehnle explains how PANTA is building what he calls "the operating system for the index industry," why benchmark regulation works in his favor, and where AI is creating real value in a market full of noise.

From Moorgate Benchmarks to PANTA

Sproehnle and his team are experienced index professionals who have seen the industry's problems from the inside for many years. His previous startup, Moorgate Benchmarks, was an index design, calculation and administration business that was acquired by Morningstar.

The idea for PANTA took shape during Moorgate's Series A raise. The process gave the team a rare look under the hood of both index producers and index users, and it created enough interest that several parties wanted to buy the company, which eventually led to the Morningstar exit. "That was the starting point where we concluded that this industry needs proper technology," Sproehnle says.

PANTA started roughly two to two and a half years ago with the goal of digitalizing the whole index value chain, from the initial idea to the index being live and usable as an underlying for an investment or trading product.

Two products, one value chain

PANTA is built around two parts. The PANTA Lab is a front end that lets anyone with an index or portfolio idea design that index through full backtesting. The PANTA Engine handles scalable, ongoing index calculation and distribution.

On the talent needed to build this, Sproehnle is clear: "You can train skills, but you cannot train attitude." PANTA hires more for culture than for skills, and on the skills side it looks for subject matter experts across product and technology, people "who have experienced the pain and who speak the customer's language."

From weeks to hours

The clearest illustration of PANTA's value is time to market. Sproehnle walks through a typical example: an asset manager wants an index of the 100 biggest U.S. stocks, excluding Tesla and SpaceX, possibly with an ESG overlay. Traditionally, the asset manager goes to its index provider, there is back and forth, and it takes a couple of weeks for the index to be designed.

With PANTA, the asset manager can design the index within a couple of hours and finalize it within a day, including backtesting and everything required from a regulatory perspective. Implementation, which usually takes the index provider another couple of days if not weeks because most providers have no front end for setting up or changing indices, comes down to one or two days.

The second advantage is flexibility. Both index producers and index users can work in a far more flexible way than legacy setups allow.

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Selling into conservative institutions

PANTA sells to two groups. On one side are index producers: established index providers and exchanges, as well as niche index providers and data companies that want to enter the space. On the other side are index users: asset managers and large asset owners, with sell-side institutions as a second step.

"Inertia is our biggest challenge," Sproehnle admits. What is shifting the conversation is a growing awareness of two paradigm shifts, more customization and more digitalization, and the realization that firms need to move now to win. Many want to do more than they are set up to build internally, which is where PANTA positions itself as the subject matter expert.

The customer journey is less about converting free users into paying ones and more about moving from problem-solving to platform. In the short term, PANTA helps index providers enter new asset classes and solve scalability problems, and helps asset managers whose business has outgrown their technology. The long-term goal is to become the operating system where producers and consumers of indices come together, "which is then hopefully sticky."

Sproehnle is candid about the tension this creates. Building something customizable and scalable at the same time is "something we have in focus every single day." He sees no clear industry trend toward either standardization or customization, but believes firms will realize "sooner rather than later" that technology and operations are becoming a commodity. Index providers, in his view, are better off focusing on creating IP and using their distribution networks to sell it.

What wins deals, he says, comes down to two things: great technology and trust. After one demo, a representative of a global asset manager said they felt "a bit like a kid in a candy store." But in an industry that is heavily regulated and built on trust, being trusted matters as much as the product itself.

Funding the go-to-market push

PANTA raised funding earlier in the year. "We have built a very strong piece of technology, and now it is about going out and selling it," Sproehnle says. The majority of the funds is going into go-to-market, with the rest supporting product development. PANTA started with equity, is now live with fixed income, and is expanding into other asset classes.

Regulation as a moat against the right people

Asked whether regulation helps or hinders, Sproehnle does not hesitate. "Regulation is a moat, but it is a moat against the right people."

Benchmark regulation keeps out what he calls "the weekend project crowd," along with anyone who treats benchmarks as just a number. What the industry needs is governance, lineage, reproducibility and audit trails designed into the technology from day one, which is hard to retrofit into legacy infrastructure. It is not a moat against incumbents, who are already compliant. "It is a moat against the vibe coders," he says.

Sproehnle speaks from experience. At Moorgate Benchmarks he was regulated by both the FCA and BaFin, and he was closely involved in the benchmark regulation process in the U.K. and the European Union. He expects a lighter regime over the next couple of years, focused on the most critical parts of the ecosystem such as LIBOR, FX benchmarks and the main equity indices, rather than the tail end of smaller indices.

Where AI creates real value

AI and machine learning are part of PANTA's daily work and have transformed both how it builds technology and the functionality it offers customers. For the wider industry, Sproehnle frames the AI question around three issues: whether a company owns the customer's workflow and system of record or simply sits next to it, whether it has proprietary data or distribution, and what happens with the output of the model. "Wrappers get disintermediated the moment the incumbent ships the same feature," he notes.

He draws a sharp line between noise and value. AI-generated indices and AI stock selection fall on the noise side. The real value sits in the operational layer: extracting structured rules from methodology documents, anomaly detection through machine learning, improving data quality in corporate actions, and natural language index design. "It is almost the unglamorous part, but it is the relevant part," he says, because that is where cost and headcount actually sit. In his words, it is "the plumbing part of the business that no one wants to look at."

Inside PANTA, AI is "an extremely large productivity boost." Product managers now do more of the coding before handing work to developers to make it institutional, and AI plays a growing role in data onboarding, where large volumes of more or less structured data need to be brought in. Having lived through the dot-com bubble and invested in AI startups for the past 10 years, Sproehnle has no doubt the technology will change how we live and work, often in areas that are not talked about. That theme echoes our recent Founders on the Record interview with Lightbringer, where AI is also reshaping the operational core of a traditional industry.

What investors should ask AI founders

Having sat on both sides of the table, Sproehnle starts every assessment with a simple question: is the company solving a problem that exists, or one that still has to be invented? Too many investment processes, he says, chase a label rather than a problem.

Going one level deeper, he lists the questions most investors forget to ask:

• What is the cost of being wrong in the product, and who carries that liability?
• Does the company own the workflow, or just sit beside someone who does?
• If the model it uses, or any model, gets 10 times better and cheaper next year, does that make the business stronger or redundant?

"Most investors ask about the model, but almost nobody asks about the failure mode."

Not just a calculator

Sproehnle's closing message to investors and clients is that the calculation itself is the easy part. "Anyone can get data in, take an average and output it again." What is hard is everything wrapped around it: data lineage, corporate actions, restatements, recalculation, governance and audit trails, run with reproducible calculations for many clients and often under regulation.

"We are not just building a calculator. We are building a system of record."

For more on how AI and capital markets are shaping software, explore the Dedale article library and the October 2026 Software Market Trends report.

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This interview was conducted by Junhao Wang. Connect with Tobias Sproehnle on LinkedIn to follow PANTA's progress.