OneAdvisory, a firm that provides unified data management for wealth management firms, announced that they closed an $8mm Seed round lead by F-Prime. Amongst the new faces in the round were Valor Equity Partners and two strategics, The Compound Capital Fund I (Ritholtz) and Flyover Capital (Mariner). This is perhaps an extension of the theme of strategics making minority investments in the tools that they feel can solve pain points that they themselves have. Makes perfect sense to us.
Additionally, they are rebranding from OneAdvisory to "Dispatch" to better capture their role as a centralized data hub for an advisor's perhaps disparate tech stack. This rebranding serves to underscore their belief that there is an emerging wealthtech category of "Data Orchestration", which is not yet on the Financial Advisor Technology Map produced by Michael Kitces and Craig Iskowicz. One could argue it falls under "Advisor Data Warehousing" but the ability to keep data synced across multiple databases in an advisor's tech stack makes it feel something a bit apart from that.
We feel that the raise underscores how important the data layer has become in wealthtech. We believe that future wealthtech development will start with the data architecture and end with the feature sets instead of the other way around. Another example might be Orion's rather formidable project to unify their data in RedShift. This trend is firmly on our radar for 2024 and beyond.