New York-based Vise, an AI-powered portfolio management platform, has announced that it secured $14.5 million in Series A funding, bring its total capital raised to $16 million.
The Series A fundraising round was led by Sequoia Capital, according to a Tuesday announcement from Vise, with participation from Founders Fund, Bling Capital, Human Capital, Lachy Groom, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen and Future Advisor co-founder Jon Xu.
Vise was founded a little over three years ago by two teenage technologists and entrepreneurs, Samir Vasavada, who now serves as the company’s CEO, and Runik Mehrotra, who now serves as chief investment officer. Its portfolio management solution is already available on the Charles Schwab and TD Ameritrade platforms, where it represents $800 million in client commitments.
“We don’t try to build a ton of planning tools,” said Mehrotra. “We think advisors will want to continue to use the planning tools they’re using today, but they’ll want the ability to take thing from those planning tools and build portfolios around them.”
Vise’s platform uses single securities and direct indexing to build highly personalized client portfolios that can take into account multiple goals as well as a client’s career, held away investments, ESG and socially responsible investing preferences, and other differentiators in a tax efficient manner.
Vise’s offering uses natural language processing to help advisors and clients build customized portfolios and to link the portfolio to talking points offering opportunities for engagement and the answers to client questions.
The company plans to use raised funds to accelerate its product development and the growth of its advisor partnerships.
“Wealth management is the heart and soul of the financial services industry, and there’s lots of room for innovation,” said Vasavada. “There’s a huge trend of advisors leaving firms like Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Ameriprise and Edward Jones, and they need someone to provide them with instsitutional grade or hedge-fund level technology in order for them to effectively compete against the large institutions. We see our relationship to advisors similar to how Shopify enabled artisans to compete against Amazon or Airbnb enabled homeowners to compete against hotels.”