Thousands of billions are to be won in retirement wars, and Vise gets $ 14.5 million from Sequoia to operate – TechCrunch

The retirement wars are heating up.

As millions of baby boomers leave their jobs over the next few years and retire, there is great competition for who will manage their savings. On the one hand, there are traditional wealth managers, companies like Edward Jones, who employ full-time human financial advisers or empower independent entrepreneurs to help clients plan their finances. On the other hand, there has been the emergence of "roboadvisors" like Wealth Front They use simple algorithms and financial products like ETFs to advise people at lower cost.

VCs have been optimistic about roboadvisers: startups like Wealthfront and Personal capital each has raised more than $ 200 million according to Crunchbase, but there has been less investment in trying to help financial advisers. After all, aren't all these people supposed to be automated by algorithms?

Screw (to "advise") takes a counter bet: its founders Samir Vasavada and Runik Mehrotra believe that humans, augmented by good artificial intelligence tools, can be even more adept at managing the financial affairs of their clients than 39; an application.

The company debuted at Heaven32 Disrupt SF last year, and we write a detailed profile of your journey from the self-funded start to our stage. Well, according to the founders, it turned out that they met Sequoia during the happy hour of the company, and one thing led to another, and Vise announces now a $ 14.5 million Series A condition sheet led by Sequoia's partner. , Shaun Maguire.

Previous investors, including Keith Rabois through Founders Fund and Ben Ling of Bling Capital finished the tour, and the startup's total fundraising is now $ 16 million.

For the founders, the main objective of Screw He built a new product using best practices from the worlds of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and converged on a platform that helps independent financial advisers come up with their own ideas for communicating with customers. "Our big thesis was, we want to think about things that are different in this industry: we don't want to build a product that is identical to the way all other space products were built," said Vasavada. "We want to build a radically different product, and the way we do it is to use a diverse team." This includes everyone, product people at notable Silicon Valley companies, AI researchers and financial services experts.

Financial advisors already rely on a suite of software ranging from CRM to investment analysis platforms to do their job, but these tools have rarely been integrated in one place. This has made the current software market quite fragmented. "The first one is that it is too inflated. There are too many tools and they do not do enough and do not add much value. C & "It is expensive. It is difficult to manage. Above all, it is not at all personalized to the advisor or personalized to the client," said Vasavada.

Instead, Vise aims to be a one stop shop for all the needs in the daily workflow of an investment advisor. This includes determining different investment options in a clean interface, customizing those options for individual clients and even helping it guide investment advisers through talking points on why some investment decisions make sense compared to other client context.

From their perspective, Vasavada and Mehrotra see the estate counseling market split into several segments, with independent real estate advisers targeting between $ 500,000 and $ 2 million in assets per client as the ideal point for Vise. These clients have more specific needs and require more personalization than less active clients, and are therefore poorly served by roboadvisors, while the main institutional players find them too small to be manipulated due to the structures. rates that have their scale.

Ultimately, Vise is a pure B2B game, and the founders want to keep this orientation in the future. They believe that wealth management advisors have a special understanding of their clients' needs and the relationships they need to build, with which Vise cannot compete.

Besides Sequoia, Founders Fund and Bling, Human Capital, Lachy Groom, Steve Chen and Jon Xu joined the tour according to the company.