direct-indexing
(9)
Mo Al Adham Is Making the Boring Parts of Wealth Management Do the Hard Work
After TwitVid, an early seat beside Instacart, and five years building products at Twitter, Mo Al Adham spent six months choosing his next decade. He picked a stubborn problem: making sophisticated, tax-aware investing feel ordinary.
From Risk Premia to Operational Alpha: Erkko Etula’s Long Way Around to Simpler Investing
A Finnish physicist-in-training followed Paul Samuelson’s advice into economics, then carried the lesson from Harvard, the New York Fed and Goldman Sachs into a different kind of wealth platform. His recurring idea is simple: the portfolio may be mathematical, but the scarce asset is an advisor’s time.
The Goldman Quants Who Turned Tax Losses Into a Selling Point
Two ex-Goldman quants built software that automates the boring, expensive part of managing money - and got a $1.3 trillion asset manager to buy the whole thing.
Vanguard
For fifty years, Vanguard turned a strange ownership structure and a suspicion of fees into an investing machine for ordinary savers. Its next act mixes index discipline with advice, AI tools and private markets - without losing the low-cost bargain that made it matter.
Seeds
Seeds is a New York-based wealthtech company that gives financial advisors an end-to-end platform for building personalized, values-aligned investment portfolios. Founded in 2020 by advisors Zach and Michael Conway, Seeds combines client assessment, proposal generation, direct indexing, tax-loss harvesting, rebalancing and trading into a single system - letting registered investment advisors (RIAs) deliver customized investing at scale without stitching together legacy tools. The company has raised more than $16.5 million, including a $10M Series A led by Portage in 2025.
Zoe Financial
Zoe Financial is a New York-based wealthtech company that connects individuals and families with vetted, independent fiduciary financial advisors while giving those advisors an all-in-one platform to run their practices. Founded in 2018 by former J.P. Morgan executive Andres Garcia-Amaya, Zoe pairs a rigorous advisor-matching service - it screens out roughly 95% of applicant advisors - with wealth-management software that handles account opening, funding, automated rebalancing, tax-efficient investing, direct indexing, and commission-free fractional trading. The company raised a $29.6M Series B in 2025 led by Sageview Capital, bringing total funding to about $45M.
Frec
Frec is a San Francisco fintech that brings direct indexing - a tax-optimization strategy long reserved for wealthy clients of private wealth managers - to everyday investors. Instead of buying an index fund, Frec customers own the underlying stocks of an index directly, which lets the platform automatically harvest tax losses, offset capital gains, and customize holdings, all for a 0.10% annual fee. Founded in 2021 by former Twitter and Instacart product leader Mo Al Adham and launched publicly in 2023, Frec also offers a portfolio line of credit, a high-yield treasury account, and tools to diversify concentrated stock positions.
Pave Finance
Pave Finance is a New York-based fintech building an AI-powered, institutional-grade wealth management platform that lets financial advisors customize, personalize and automate portfolio construction for their clients. Combining an alpha-scoring algorithm, an optimization engine and an integrated trading platform across 10,000+ global securities, Pave brings tools once reserved for hedge funds and ultra-high-net-worth desks to everyday advisors - offering direct indexing, tax-loss harvesting, values-based screens and concentrated-position management. In September 2025 the company closed an oversubscribed $14M seed round.
Auden Ehringer
Auden Ehringer is the Chief Technology Officer of Pave Finance and CEO of its technology subsidiary, Pave Labs. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer and computer scientist, he spent the early part of his career keeping some of the world's largest systems running - building Alexa sports features at Amazon Lab126 and serving as a Site Reliability Engineer on YouTube Discovery at Google. In 2023 he traded planet-scale infrastructure for the messier world of money, joining the New York fintech Pave Finance to build software that lets independent advisers automate and personalize portfolio management across thousands of client accounts. The platform he leads now helps oversee billions in assets, and in 2025 the company closed an oversubscribed $14M seed round.