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https://www.wealthtechstrategy.com/post/robinhood-acquires-pluto Robinhood announced last week that it has acquired Pluto Capital, an AI-powered investment research and portfolio construction platform targeted at retail. According to the company, the Pluto acquisition will allow Robinhood investors to: Enhanced analytics to identify trends and opportunities using large language models and real-time data. Personalized investment strategies based on risk tolerance, investment goals, and historical behavior. Real-time insights and optimization with AI-driven analysis. This appears to be part of Robinhood's ongoing effort to re-monetize their installed base by diversifying away from day-trading and bitcoin towards longer-term investment strategies and wealth management. Link to article: https://www.finextra.com/pressarticle/101372/robinhood-acquires-ai-investment-research-platform-pluto-capital

Feel free to swing by our presentation during the FinTech Scaling Workshop on Tuesday, June 25 or schedule a 1:1 conversation with Kendrick with this link: https://a.e180.co/l/zCAvsG/ Topics: The state of VC investments in WealthTech The rise of strategic investors in WealthTech Reaching out to strategics vs reaching out to VCs The role of Corporate Venture Capital in the ecosystem

WealthOS , a London-based WealthTech startup that provides a modular platform for building wealth management apps, announced that it has closed its £4mm Seed round. The round saw heavy participation from Barclays and is another example of a financial services firm making a minority investment in solutions that solve known pain points. In fact, it is fair to say that Barclays is out ahead of the pack on the corporate venture capital front as it is not only an active investor, but they have their own accelerator program. That makes it a one-two punch for innovation. As an aside, WealthOS was a graduate of the Barclays Rise accelerator program as well as the Arlington, TX-based WealthTech accelerator The Founders Arena . Link to press release

Egyptian financial conglomerate EFG Hermes, the largest brokerage firm in MENA, amongst other things, has made a minority investment in Kenzi Wealth, a Danish WealthTech start-up with an AI-enabled portfolio management app. EFG Hermes will integrate Kenzi's portfolio management solution with their EFG Hermes ONE trading platform. We see this as a good example of corporate venture capital creating a win-win situation. EFG Hermes gets to delight their clients with an innovative solution that fills a feature gap in their product. Kenzi gains capital and access to a vast distribution network. And, although the terms of the deal were not announced, we suspect that EFG's investment will turn a tidy profit once the product is released to its vast client base. While it was not clear from the announcement if EFG made the investment directly off their balance sheet or via a corporate venture capital arm, we feel that the latter is a more prudent way to capitalize on the trend of corporate minority investments driving innovation, partnership, and growth. Link to Corporate Venture Capital Consulting service Link to press release

When using someone's Calendly link to schedule a meeting, don't type your name where it says "Name". Instead, type the subject so people know what it is about. That is the way it will appear in people's calendars. Nobody reads the fine print. The one on the left will just show up in the calendar as "Kendrick Wakeman" while the one on the right will show up at "Kendrick <> Kraft re: Quarterback".

WealthTech Strategy Partners announced today that Craig Iannucci has joined its board of consultants. Craig comes to WealthTech Strategy with a 25+ year career in financial services. He spent the first 20 years of his career on Wall Street as an institutional investor at firms such as UBS, Millennium Partners, SAC Capital, and Cannondale Capital, gaining experience in both the public and private markets, He transitioned to the entrepreneurial world where he utilizes his financial acumen to help early-stage companies align resources with strategic priorities, raise capital, and scale. He served as the President & CFO of Cloudvisor Wealth as well as Advising CFO at Marstone, Public Trust Advisors, and Equitus AI, helping them navigate the waters of finance. Over the course of his career, he has created over $100m of value for investors and more recently, helped steer companies to over $400m in value through funding and M&A activities. "Craig brings a strong financial background and practical approach to prepping for and executing a solid funding transaction," said Kendrick Wakeman, CEO of WealthTech Strategy Partners. "Our mission is to help early-stage companies grow. Often, early-stage founders need a little extra guidance when it is time to prepare for financing. That is where having someone like Craig is a huge benefit." Craig graduated from the University of Richmond with a dual degree in business and marketing.

Archive Intel, a firm founded by industry veteran Larry Shumbres to combine communication archiving and compliance screening, announced that they raised a $1mm Seed Round from early-stage VC fund Social Leverage. From our standpoint, it's nice to see a VC stepping up and sole-funding a WealthTech startup. Hopefully, that is another signs of a thaw in the funding market. Of course, it also probably helps that it solidly falls into one of our thesis opportunities for WealthTech for the rest of this decade: making compliance integrated, scaled, and automated. As our followers know, we separate compliance in wealth management into "regulatory compliance" and "direct surveillance". Regulatory compliance is things like establishing and maintaining licenses, creating and maintaining policies and procedures, marketing reviews, etc. These activities are usually applied at the firm level and, while technology can help significantly, it is not a gating factor. On the other hand, direct surveillance is things like monitoring for suitability and Reg BI, identifying unusual trading activity, and of course, screening correspondence between advisors and clients. These activities are applied at the account level and thus have significant scale. As regulators move away from statistical sampling and more towards systematic, real-time surveillance, technology is a must-have, not a nice-to-have. In fact, we don't see how the firm of the future can operate without integrated, scaled, and automated direct surveillance systems. For further reading, feel free to look at our white paper on this topic. Link to press release

Altruist, the RIA custodian challenger built on modern technology, announced yesterday that they had raised $169mm in a Series E round valuing the company at $1.5B+. This crosses them over into "Unicorn" territory after narrowly missing last year with a Series D valuation of reportedly $962mm. So with $450mm of funding raised, a $1.5b valuation in about 6 years, and having reportedly grown revenue by 550% last year, it is worth pausing to look at what is going on here. Without detracting from what is clearly a great vision and great execution, we would like to point out a more broadly applicable trend: new technology. In normal times, incumbents have a tremendous advantage over challengers. Their installed base, financial resources, and established brands make it difficult for challengers to make significant inroads. However, when we see a significant advance in technology, the positions can be reversed. The challengers are better able to adopt the new technologies while the incumbents struggle to replace their older technology, a phenomenon known as "Tech Debt". To the extent the new technology has significant operational and product advantages, and to the extent that the challenger is able to execute well, the challenger will have at least some advantage over the incumbent. In any case, it is nice to see a new Unicorn in WealthTech, even though I have hated the term "Unicorn" since the very first moment I heard it. Link to Press Release

Midas, which is a Turkish version of Robinhood, announced that they have raised a $45mm Series A round, claiming it to be the largest early stage fintech funding round in Turkey to date. The round was lead by Portage, a Toronto VC firm, and had participation from 5 other venture capital firms, which is a nice sign. The round builds on their $11mm Seed round in 2022. This perhaps illustrates a theme we have been watching: growth of robo advice and investor self-service in geographies where an emerging mass-affluent far outstrips the supply of human financial advice. We point out that Midas only started three years ago and is already profitable. The ability for users to easily invest in the US market, robust educational content, and commission-free trading could be contributing factors to their growth. Midas intends to use the proceeds to expand their product offering into crypto, mutual funds, and savings accounts. They are also looking at geographic expansion into emerging markets, presumably those with an emerging mass-affluent class. Link to Press Release

iCapital, an alternative investment platform for the wealth management industry, announced that they will acquire Mirador, a data aggregation and reporting platform with extensive alternative investment capabilities. The firms believe that the combined offering will enhance iCapital's ability to bring alternative assets down into the high-net-worth segment at something approaching scale. This fits in with our "Family Office As-a-Service" theme. We believe that the industry can use technology to scale some of the services found primarily at large family offices and private banks and bring those services down market into the high-net-worth market. The key is to allow advisors to provide these services without having to expend additional effort or acquire extensive expertise. Alternative Investments is one of those services. Link to press release

NewRetirement, a comprehensive financial planning and financial wellness platform serving individuals and enterprise clients, announced that it has raised $20mm in a Series A funding round. The round was lead by existing investor Allegis Capital and quite a few other VCs, some of which are new faces to NewRetirement, from what we can tell. We like seeing that. Several Corporate Venture Capital arms also participated, namely Nationwide Ventures and Northwestern Mutual Ventures, which isn't surprising to us given the large-scale problems insurance companies have when it comes to financial advice and the solutions technology can provide. Amongst other things, NewRetirement will use the proceeds to continue to scale, enhance its enterprise offerings, and, of course, integrate LLMs and AI to provide more personalized recommendations. We will also point out that Benjamin App also announced that they raised money from VCs: $5.5mm in a Seed round. While Benjamin is not WealthTech (they are a cash rewards app), it's close enough for us to notice, especially since we are always on the lookout for the arrival of Spring in the WealthTech VC funding market.

WealthTech Strategy Partners welcome Brian Colville as the newest team member. He has over 25 years of experience in the industry, most notably he spent 17 years as the Founder and CEO of Colville Consulting, a trusted technology and investment operations partner providing a highly-diverse set of software, data, technology, and highly tech-enabled investment operations services to leading institutional asset management firms, wealth management platforms, and other fintech software providers. Colville Consulting’s services included: portfolio accounting, trading and CRM system implementations, custom software development, data aggregation and transformation; trading, trade order management and trade reconciliation; position- and tax-lot reconciliation; BI and reporting; partnership accounting; deep systems- and counter-party integration; market data management and corporate actions-related services; and a range of regulatory compliance services including SEC audit support and periodic regulatory filings (13F and 13G). Known as GIPS experts, Colville Consulting provided a range of composite performance measurement services. Colville Consulting also provided pre-and post-acquisition consulting and enterprise integration services for private-equity-led asset management and wealth management roll-ups. Colville Consulting representative clients included: • Ashland Partners (Adviser Compliance Associates) • Aperio Group (BlackRock) • Becker Capital Management • Bingham, Osborn and Scarborough • Boston Private • Chevy Chase Trust • Coldstream Capital • Evercore • Focus Financial • Freestone Capital Management • Ferguson Wellman • Guggenheim Investments • ICONIQ Capital • Morningstar • Rydex Funds • Sand Hill Investment Advisers • Schwab Institutional • Seattle Northwest Securities/ SNW Asset Management • Security Global • SunTrust • Wetherby Asset Management (Laird Norton) We are delighted to have him aboard!