401k
(13)
Abdul Al-Asaad
He grew up in a refugee camp and learned finance at Goldman Sachs. Now Abdul Al-Asaad wants to hand ordinary savers the borrowing power that has always belonged to the wealthy.
Aaron Schumm
He built the plumbing behind America's savings accounts - the 401(k)s, 529s and state programs most people never think about - by betting that the boring middle of finance was the biggest opportunity nobody wanted.
Trevor Gary
Trevor Gary is the founder and CEO of Micruity, a retirement-income infrastructure company that connects 401(k) recordkeepers, asset managers and insurers so plans can offer annuities and pension-style lifetime income. A former pension actuary at Deloitte Canada, Gary saw firsthand how the shift from defined-benefit pensions to 401(k) plans left millions of Americans without guaranteed income in retirement. He founded Micruity in 2017-2018 to build the data conduit that makes lifetime-income products work at scale. The company has raised roughly $27 million from a roster of insurance and financial heavyweights including Prudential, TIAA, State Street, Nationwide, J.P. Morgan Asset Management and Pacific Life.
Basic Capital
Basic Capital is a New York fintech building a modernized 401(k) and IRA platform that lets everyday workers finance their retirement investments rather than only contribute out of pocket. For every dollar a saver puts in, the company supplies supplemental capital - roughly four additional dollars - so contributions are deployed into diversified portfolios of ETFs, bonds, and access to alternatives like private credit. Founded by former Goldman Sachs banker Abdul Al-Asaad, it positions itself as the first platform to bring financing and alternative assets into tax-advantaged retirement accounts, and raised a $25M Series A in August 2025 led by Forerunner and Lux Capital.
Vestwell
Vestwell is a New York-based fintech that operates as digital savings infrastructure for the American workplace. Founded in 2016 by Aaron Schumm, it provides an API-driven recordkeeping and administration platform that lets employers, financial advisors, payroll providers, and state governments offer 401(k), 403(b), IRA, 529 education, ABLE disability, and emergency savings accounts. By 2026 the company administered more than $50B in assets for over 2 million savers, powered the majority of state-facilitated retirement programs in the U.S., and raised a $385M Series E to expand the modern savings economy.
Micruity
Micruity is a financial-technology infrastructure company building the data pipes that let lifetime-income products work inside everyday 401(k) plans. Its Advanced Routing System (MARS) acts as a secure central clearing house that connects insurers, asset managers, recordkeepers and plan sponsors, letting them communicate, verify and aggregate annuity data so retirement savings can be turned into a predictable monthly paycheck. Founded in 2017 by Trevor Gary and Chris Livadas, the company is headquartered in Toronto and raised an oversubscribed $20M Series A in December 2025.
Penelope
Penelope is a New York fintech that makes 401(k) retirement plans practical for the businesses that usually get ignored - the corner shop, the two-person startup, the solopreneur. Founded in 2021 by former Wall Street executive Jean Kim Smart and named after her daughter, the company started as a low-cost, self-service platform offering Pooled Employer Plans, traditional 401(k)s and Solo 401(k)s, and has since built a cloud-native, API-first, SECURE 2.0-ready recordkeeping platform that independent recordkeepers and benefit providers can run under their own brand. The pitch is unglamorous but real: automate the paperwork, cut the cost, and let roughly 60 million Americans who work for small employers start saving.
Jean Smart
Jean Smart is the founder and CEO of Penelope, a New York fintech rebuilding the retirement recordkeeping layer for the small and micro-businesses Wall Street forgot. After a 20-plus year career as a financial-services executive at Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade, Citigroup and UBS, she left a managing-director seat to build affordable, fully-digital 401(k) infrastructure for solopreneurs and mom-and-pop shops. The company, which she named after her daughter, launched in 2022 with a mission to put generational wealth-building within reach of the workers institutions have historically overlooked.
Qian Liu
Qian Liu is a fintech operator and data scientist who helped build the robo investing movement from the inside. A computer scientist by training - PhD in machine learning from Penn, BS from Tsinghua - she was an early member of the Wealthfront founding team and its Director of Research, then Head of Data at GoFundMe, then Chief Data Officer at Guideline, the small-business 401(k) platform. When Gusto acquired Guideline, she moved into a leadership role at Gusto, where the brokerage entity sits inside its HR, payroll and benefits platform serving small and medium businesses. In 2024 she co-authored 'The Little Book of Robo Investing' with Elizabeth MacBride, turning a decade of building automated investing products into a plain-spoken guide for ordinary savers.
Finhabits
Finhabits is a bilingual financial wellness platform built by Latinos, for Latinos, that turns small, automatic deposits into diversified investment portfolios. Founded by MIT-trained engineer Carlos Garcia, the New York fintech pairs low-minimum Roth and Traditional IRAs with Spanish-and-English financial education to close the wealth gap for first-time investors, serving hundreds of thousands of members who often start with as little as a few dollars a week.
Human Interest
Human Interest is a San Francisco-based fintech company on a mission to make retirement savings accessible to every American worker, regardless of where they work. The company provides affordable, full-service 401(k) and 403(b) plans designed for small and medium-sized businesses — the 99% of employers who have historically been priced out of quality retirement plan options. With a platform that handles recordkeeping, compliance, payroll integration, and investment management all in one place, Human Interest has become one of the fastest-growing retirement plan providers in the U.S., serving nearly 50,000 employers and 2 million+ eligible employees.
Jeff Schneble
Jeff Schneble is the CEO of Human Interest, a San Francisco-based fintech company on a mission to close America's $28 trillion retirement savings gap by making 401(k) and 403(b) plans affordable and accessible for small and medium-sized businesses. A physicist turned venture capitalist turned operator, Schneble brought together a rare trifecta of academic rigor (PhD from Cambridge, MBA from Harvard), investment experience (Partner at Wing Venture Capital), and hands-on operational chops (Silver Lake Partners) before taking the helm at Human Interest in 2019. Under his leadership, the company has grown to serve over 45,000 companies, surpassed $200 million in ARR, raised over $1 billion in total funding at a $3 billion valuation, and is eyeing a public listing.
Roger Lee
Roger Lee is a San Francisco-based serial entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and CEO of Comprehensive, an all-in-one compensation management platform, and the creator of Layoffs.fyi, the internet's go-to tracker for tech layoffs. He also co-founded Human Interest, a $1B+ 401(k) platform serving over 20,000 small businesses. A Harvard Applied Mathematics graduate who taught himself HTML at age 12, Lee has been building internet products since the early 2000s - including a teen social network that reached 30 million monthly views in 2003. Named to San Francisco Business Times '40 Under 40' in 2023, he's become the de facto authority on both where tech workers are being let go and how much they should be getting paid.