Every financial advisor knows the same dirty secret about personalizing a client's portfolio: the math is easy, and the labor is brutal. You want to track the S&P 500 but skip the tech stock your client already holds too much of. You want to sell the losers in December to offset the winners. You want to show, in plain numbers, what all that did after tax. Done by hand, across hundreds of households, it is a spreadsheet death march. Brooklyn Investment Group was built to make the death march disappear.
The company is a white-label managed-accounts platform - infrastructure that advisors and asset managers plug into, brand as their own, and use to build custom, tax-managed portfolios across equities, fixed income, ETFs and mutual funds inside a single custodian account. The pitch is not glamorous. It is daily tax-loss harvesting, automated rebalancing, concentrated-position selldowns and after-tax reporting. And that unglamorous pitch was good enough that Nuveen, the $1.3 trillion asset-management arm of TIAA, bought the entire company in 2025.
01 / The IdeaDirect indexing, minus the human with a spreadsheet
Direct indexing is a simple concept wearing an intimidating name. Instead of buying a fund that tracks an index, you buy the underlying stocks directly. Because you own the individual pieces, you can customize - exclude a sector, tilt toward a theme, or sell specific lots at a loss to harvest a tax benefit while keeping index-like exposure. It has been pitched as the future of investing for the better part of a decade. The friction was always operations: doing it well, for many clients at once, is expensive.
Brooklyn's answer was to treat the whole thing as a software problem and go where most rivals didn't - beyond stocks. Its platform is multi-asset, so an advisor can run a personalized equity sleeve, a tax-managed bond ladder, and fund positions in one account, with the tax engine watching all of it. Advisors can track a third-party index, an ETF or mutual fund, or a fully custom index built from scratch, then let the system handle the monitoring.
What the platform automates, end to end
02 / The FoundersTwo people who ran this math for Wall Street first
The credibility behind that claim comes from the resumes. CEO and co-founder Erkko Etula holds a bachelor's from MIT and a PhD from Harvard, spent a stint as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and then a decade at Goldman Sachs, where he was a Managing Director leading strategic and quantitative asset-allocation research. In other words, he built and ran systematic investment processes for Goldman's clients before deciding independent advisors deserved the same tooling. Co-founder John Nay is an AI researcher whose earlier venture, Skopos Labs, became the seed of Brooklyn's parent, Brooklyn Artificial Intelligence Research.
That pairing - an institutional quant and an AI researcher - shows up in the product. The heavy portfolio-optimization machinery is the kind of thing that used to live only on trading desks; the packaging is the kind of thing that turns it into a portal an advisor can log into on a Tuesday. As Etula has framed the mission, the goal is to let advisors scale personalization in an era where customization, not just performance, is what keeps clients around.
03 / The CustomersIt sells shovels, not gold
Brooklyn does not chase retail investors. Its customers are the professionals: independent registered investment advisers (RIAs) and asset managers. The company reported that its clients collectively oversee more than $2 trillion in assets, delivered either as licensed white-label technology or as a subadvisory service through Brooklyn Investment Group, LLC, an SEC-registered investment adviser. That B2B choice is the strategic heart of the story. In a market where dozens of firms were racing to launch consumer-facing direct-indexing brands, Brooklyn chose to be the plumbing underneath them.
It is the classic gold-rush trade: sell the shovels. And it made the company easy to buy, because acquiring Brooklyn meant acquiring rails that other people were already running on.
Where Brooklyn sits vs. the field
04 / The ProductsHarvesting losses, on purpose, every day
The catalog reads like a menu of things advisors used to dread. There is custom multi-asset direct indexing. There is automated tax management - daily surveillance for loss harvesting, rebalancing and lifecycle events. There are tax-advantaged long/short portfolios, the 130/30 and 145/45 extension strategies that squeeze extra tax benefit out of index-like exposure. There is concentrated-position management, the tax-neutral selldown programs that unwind a client's oversized single-stock bet over time. And there is AI-powered index creation, with point-in-time backtesting for thematic ideas - including a liquidity-adjusted ADR index and multi-asset transition analyses.
Tying it together is the part clients actually see: an advisor portal for customization and household management, plus daily after-tax performance dashboards. The insight there is quietly sharp. Tax-loss harvesting has been sold for years, but its value is invisible unless someone shows it to you. Make the after-tax number legible on a screen, and the abstract benefit becomes a reason a client stays put.
05 / The MoneyPartner first, sell later
Brooklyn's cap table doubles as a strategy diagram. In December 2024 the parent company closed a strategic funding round led by Atypical Ventures, with participation from S&P Global Ventures, the CEO of the Hantz Group, and a bench of asset- and wealth-management executives. Bringing S&P Global in was more than capital - the two sides had already collaborated on MyIndex, a tool letting managers customize leading indices like the S&P 500.
But the most instructive relationship was with Nuveen. The two firms struck a strategic partnership in 2023 and co-developed direct-indexing and multi-asset tax-managed solutions together. Nuveen was, in effect, a customer and collaborator before it was an owner. When it announced the acquisition on June 17, 2025, the deal read less like a courtship and more like a couple that had already been living together deciding to make it official.
From partner to parent - the timeline
06 / The FitWhy a giant paid up for 28 people
Nuveen manages roughly $1.3 trillion. Brooklyn had around 28 employees. On paper it looks like a rounding error; in practice it was a build-versus-buy decision. Direct indexing was becoming table stakes for large asset managers, and rebuilding a mature, multi-asset, tax-aware platform - one that outside firms already trusted with real money - would have cost years. Nuveen CEO Bill Huffman said the combined firm would "reshape the direct indexing landscape" by folding in alternatives and lifetime-income capabilities. Etula, for his part, called Nuveen's wealth team and advisor relationships "the perfect fit."
There is a cautionary edge to the story, too. The conditions that made Brooklyn work were specific: a wedge that incumbents had underinvested in (multi-asset, white-label), founders with the institutional pedigree to be believed, and a deep-pocketed partner willing to co-build before buying. Absent any one of those - the pedigree, the partner, the unglamorous focus on operations rather than a flashy consumer brand - the same product might have stayed a promising demo. Brooklyn's edge was less a single invention than the discipline to automate work everyone agreed was tedious and few had bothered to fully productize.
07 / The TakeawayWhat a reader can actually copy
For advisors, the usable lesson is concrete: personalization and visible after-tax reporting are retention tools, not just performance tools. For founders, the playbook is cleaner still. Pick a boring, expensive, universally-hated workflow. Automate it end to end. Sell it as infrastructure so your customers do your distribution. And if a strategic buyer wants to partner before they buy - let them, because a customer who has already integrated your rails is the most motivated acquirer you will ever meet.
Brooklyn Investment Group made direct indexing boring on purpose, and boring turned out to be the whole business.