NEW YORK (Reuters) - Financial services software startup OpenFin has raised $17 million in a funding round led by Wells Fargo & Co with participation from Barclays, the company said on Thursday.

Slideshow ( 2 images )

Existing investors including JPMorgan Chase & Co, Bain Capital Ventures and Pivot Investment Partners, also participated in the round, the company said.

OpenFin, which is headquartered in New York and London, will use the cash injection to accelerate sales efforts and for product development, it said.

Founded in 2010, the company has developed an operating system that enables financial institutions to more easily create and upgrade their computer applications, similarly to how consumer apps are updated on smartphones.

This can help large firms cut down on the time and money needed to modernize the software they use for a wide array of both front- and back-office functions, such as trading or risk management.

It would otherwise take between 6 to 18 months for a financial institution to deploy or update an application, OpenFin said.

Over the past few years, banks have been ramping up partnerships and investments in young companies that create products and services which can help large financial institutions remain competitive in an increasingly digital world.

“Banks know that they need to significantly reduce their cost of doing business and they need to increase productivity,” Mazy Dar, chief executive and co-founder of OpenFin, said in an interview.

“All of this heavy infrastructure needs to be replaced with something that is a lot more agile and nimble.”

OpenFin’s operating system is used on nearly 200,000 desktops at 15 global investment banks and more than 1,500 other banks and buy-side firms, it said.

The latest investment brings the company’s total amount of venture funding to $40 million.