WealthTech Safari — Week of October 30, 2026
Nevis raises $70M Series B as Schwab joins as a strategic investor
Nevis, which is building an AI operating system for wealth management, raised a $70 million Series B led by EQT Ventures with Schwab, Sequoia, ICONIQ, QuantumLight and Ribbit Capital participating, taking total funding to $110 million two years after founding while platform assets grew from $50 billion to more than $700 billion in a year.
Schwab's minority stake is corporate venture capital doing its job, keeping an incumbent close to innovation, and gives Nevis a path to extend its agents across custodial infrastructure that serves more than 17,000 independent RIAs.
MMnote: Schwab has now written six minority checks in less than two years: Wealth.com (twice), Qapita, Dynasty Financial Partners, Provable Markets and now Nevis.
Wealthsimple raises up to $303M at a $9.9B valuation, led by GIC
Wealthsimple, the Toronto-based digital financial services company, agreed to an equity round of up to about $303 million (CAD $425 million) at a post-money valuation of about $9.9 billion, with assets under administration reaching about $121 billion as of September 30, up from roughly $71 billion at its October 2025 raise.
With checking openings outpacing new investment accounts for the first time in Q2 and 1 in 4 Canadians aged 18 to 40 on the platform, a profitable investing app has become the everyday financial relationship that sets the bar for client experience in Canadian wealth.
Knote: Young people want to be able to control their entire financial lives with just their thumbs. 1 in 4 young Canadians use Wealthsimple and it is similar for Robinhood (75% of their 28 million funded accounts are 43 or younger, so maybe 15-20% penetration).
Gateway Financial Partners launches GatewayGO on Milemarker
Gateway Financial Partners, which supports more than 200 affiliated advisors across 27 states with over $10 billion in assets under advisement, launched GatewayGO, a branded advisor platform built on Milemarker that pulls custodian, CRM, planning, billing and compliance systems into one view, rolling out from November 2026.
Gateway buys the integration engine but keeps the brand and the data, with Milemarker reconciling everything into one data foundation in Gateway's own governed environment so future dashboards, workflows and AI tools draw on the same figures.
Knote: Once you get that data foundation in place, the sky is the limit.
Raymond James makes its $1.1B tech budget a recruiting pitch
On its Q4 FY2026 earnings call, Raymond James said its more than $1.1 billion in annual technology spending now includes a proprietary AI assistant, Raimond, and an AI meeting manager that prepares and summarizes client meetings and feeds action items into CRM and supervisory systems.
CEO Paul Shoukry framed the spending as time back for advisors rather than disintermediation, and named scale as a recruiting edge that many competing firms cannot match at their size.
Knote: They see tech as one of the pillars of attraction for advisor recruitment. Nothing new, but it is nice to see they are putting their money where their mouth is.
Schwab study finds RIAs investing in AI but rarely using agents
Schwab's 2026 Independent Advisor Outlook Study, a survey of 1,235 RIAs managing $497 billion, found 49% investing in AI to improve workflows but only 7% using agentic AI today, while 37% offer private market investments and another 13% plan to add them within three years.
RIAs ranked AI regulation and guidance as their top advocacy priority at 38%, with 68% preferring clear, easy-to-understand standards and only 4% favoring all-encompassing mandates.
Knote: Only 38% of advisors want AI regulation and guidance advocacy, but it was the highest-ranked item, and I suspect the C-suite results are much higher still.
AI Air Traffic Control: A quick summary of interesting AI launches for those with AI fatigue
Zeplyn Turns Firms' Operating Playbooks into Agentic Workflows https://www.wealthtechstrategy.com/post/zeplyn-now-turns-wealth-management-firms-operating-playbooks-into-agentic-workflows
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