financial-planning
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Prophix wants finance to stop chasing its own numbers
Budgets held together by spreadsheets made Prophix a business. Connecting planning, the financial close, and AI is its bid to win more of the CFO’s working day.
Defaqto’s five stars hide a much bigger business
The familiar insurance badge is the shop window. Behind it, Defaqto sells the data and software that help financial companies design products, compare rivals and explain their decisions.
Dynamic Planner built a business on the second opinion
People wanted a human to check the computer’s financial advice. Dynamic Planner turned that habit into a software business, then rebuilt it when its original customers changed course.
Envestnet Built the Operating System for Advice. Now It Has to Make the Whole Thing Feel Like One Product.
After 25 years of buying and building the plumbing behind financial advice, Envestnet reaches roughly a third of U.S. advisors. Its new challenge is less about adding another tool and more about making a sprawling suite behave like one coherent machine.
Newport Put the Family Balance Sheet Before the Portfolio - and Turned Private Markets Into a $6 Billion Pitch
Most wealth firms begin with a portfolio. Newport begins with the family - then builds an endowment-style mix of public and private assets around the life that money is supposed to fund.
The 100-Year-Old Money Machine Betting Its Next C$70 Million on AI - Without Firing the Humans
IGM Financial spent a century turning face-to-face advice into a Canadian institution. Now it is cutting complexity, absorbing a C$95.3 million charge and recycling the savings into AI - a test of whether old trust and new software can compound together.
The $1.7 Billion Wealth Firm That Sold the Plumbing - and Kept Its Name
US Financial Services spent three decades building a planning practice around life transitions. Then it made a counterintuitive succession move: join a larger platform, preserve the local brand, and turn the firm itself into a home for other advisers.
NorthRock Built a $12 Billion Firm Around the Rich Person's Worst Job: Coordination
Wealth creates options - and an absurd amount of administrative work. NorthRock's bet is that affluent clients will pay one team to make the investment manager, CPA, estate lawyer, insurance adviser and philanthropy plan behave like one system.
PlanScout Bought a 13-Year-Old Planning Engine - Then Turned 15 Hours of Advisor Work Into 3
Financial advisors have plenty of software and too little time. PlanScout's answer is a hybrid: buy the planning engine, add a human service layer, and return a client-ready plan in days.
True North Built a $5.86 Billion Wealth Firm by Refusing to Sell the Usual Stuff
Scott Wood and Mark Gehlbach left product-tied Wall Street advice behind, built the alternative-investment shelf they wished existed, and waited 24 years before taking outside capital. Now comes the harder trick: scaling a family office without turning trust into a product.
Ark Financial Wants to Be the COO of Your Family Money - But the Model Comes With Homework
The Austin firm turned a rich-family institution into an operating system for entrepreneurs. Its cleverest product is coordination - and its most useful lesson is that even a coordinator must be audited.
The $4 Billion Freedom Bet: How XML Financial Group Built a Wealth Firm by Refusing to Build Alone
XML Financial Group escaped the big-bank playbook, then discovered that independence works better with infrastructure. Its repeatable trick is equal parts personal advice, succession planning and culture-first M&A.
The $6 Billion RIA Built to Make Complicated Money Feel Boring
Ashton Thomas sells a scarce luxury: one coordinated view of a wealthy family’s messy financial life. Its post-2023 expansion shows how a regional adviser can add offices, specialists and assets without sanding away the local teams clients hired in the first place.
The Richmond Firm That Manages $4.9 Billion by Managing Memory
A former KPMG tax partner built a Richmond multi-family office on a stubborn premise: the hardest part of managing $4.9 billion isn't the portfolio - it's the paperwork, the people and the memory behind it.
Gratus Capital Built the Anti-Wall-Street Wealth Firm - Then Chose a Bigger Bench
Hank McLarty left the wirehouses to put tax, estate and investment specialists on one team. Nineteen years and roughly $3.8 billion later, Gratus made the counterintuitive move: surrender the stand-alone firm to expand what clients could get.
The Private Bank Built for Wealth That Hasn't Turned Into Cash Yet
Citizens used the regional-bank shock of 2023 to assemble a relationship bank for founders, fund partners and families with complicated balance sheets. By the end of 2025, the two-year-old unit held $14.5 billion in deposits and $10 billion in client wealth assets.
Bernstein Private Wealth Management
A research house that started by publishing uncomfortable truths now spends its days on the harder question wealthy families rarely say out loud: who gets it, and will the money outlast the people who made it.
Raymond James
A firm that started in a downtown St. Petersburg apartment now watches over $1.92 trillion - and it still measures itself one advisor and one client at a time.
LPL Financial
LPL Financial built a $2.6 trillion business by staying behind the advisor. Now its bet is that scale, open architecture and embedded AI can make independence feel less lonely - without making every practice look the same.
Rockland Trust
Rockland Trust began by taking deposits door to door in a Model T. More than a century later, its bet is still the same: technology gets you farther when a local banker comes along for the ride.
Cashboard
Cashboard is a New York-based, Y Combinator-backed (S22) startup building a semantic layer that sits between a company's financial data and AI. It stores the metrics, data models, mappings and permissions that let AI agents - and finance teams - produce accurate, governed FP&A work: reports, dashboards and analysis pulled from 900+ connected systems. Founder Julian Rowlands frames the goal as turning AI into a 'trusted FP&A machine' and, eventually, the 'solo CFO.' The company raised a $5M seed led by FINTOP Capital in July 2026.
YC Partners
YC Partners is a Frederick, Maryland based fractional CFO firm that embeds licensed CPAs and finance executives into small and mid-market companies, typically in the $10M-$50M revenue range. Founded and led by CPA Nicole Sithithavorn, the firm delivers strategic financial leadership, GAAP reporting, forecasting, and M&A support on month-to-month terms, positioned as roughly 80% of the value of a full-time CFO at 20-40% of the cost.
Farther
Farther is a New York-based technology-driven wealth management firm that pairs human financial advisors with a proprietary 'Intelligent Wealth Platform.' Founded in 2019 by Taylor Matthews and Brad Genser, the company gives advisors an all-in-one digital ecosystem for financial planning, investing, tax optimization, and estate planning, while offering clients a family-office-style experience. After a $150 million Series D led by General Atlantic in 2026, Farther has grown to roughly $23 billion in recruited assets and ranks among the fastest-growing financial services firms in the United States.
Harness (Harness Wealth)
Harness (Harness Wealth) is a New York fintech that pairs software with a curated marketplace of vetted tax, financial and estate advisors, aimed at people with complex finances - startup founders, equity-holding employees, business owners, crypto investors and other 'builders.' It combines a vertical SaaS platform that powers collaboration between tax advisors and their clients, a marketplace to discover specialist firms, and consumer tools for tracking equity and net worth. Founded in 2018 by David Snider, the former CFO/COO of Compass, the company has raised roughly $40M and grew revenue by more than 1,500% between 2021 and 2024.
Nitrogen (formerly Riskalyze)
Nitrogen, formerly Riskalyze, is an Auburn, California wealth-management software company that helps financial advisors grow their firms. It invented the Risk Number, a way to quantify an investor's risk tolerance and align it with their portfolio, and has expanded into a connected suite covering proposal generation, investment research, financial planning, client engagement, compliance and AI-assisted advisor workflows. More than five million investors have received a Risk Number, and the platform snaps into the gap between a firm's marketing, CRM and asset platforms to create a consistent client experience.
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.
Backer
Backer is a San Francisco fintech company that makes it easy for families to open and grow tax-advantaged 529 college savings accounts, letting relatives and friends chip in through shareable gifting pages. Founded in 2016 as CollegeBacker, the company acquired the education-savings resource Saving For College in December 2023 alongside a $9.5M Series A round, pairing its consumer savings app with one of the web's most-used 529 research destinations.
Boldin
Boldin (formerly NewRetirement) is a Mill Valley, California fintech that makes comprehensive financial and retirement planning software affordable and self-directed. What began as a spreadsheet built to help founder Steve Chen's mother draw down her retirement savings has grown into a platform where more than 350,000 people have built plans covering over $300 billion in assets. Boldin sells a low-cost consumer subscription (PlannerPlus) plus a free planner, live classes, coaching, and CFP advice, and licenses its planning engine to enterprises like Nationwide and RTX.
Drivetrain
Drivetrain is an AI-native financial planning and analysis (FP&A) platform that helps CFOs and finance teams at mid-market and enterprise companies plan, forecast, and report with a spreadsheet-like interface. Founded in 2021 by former Google and Elevation Capital operators, it connects to 800+ business systems (ERP, CRM, HRIS, billing, data warehouses) and uses its Drive AI suite - model generation, an AI analyst, anomaly detection, and natural-language data transforms - to turn raw data into live financial models. In 2025 it shipped the first Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for finance, letting teams query permission-controlled financial data through assistants like Claude and ChatGPT.
Ellevest
Ellevest is a New York-based financial company built by and for women. Co-founded in 2014 by former Wall Street executive Sallie Krawcheck and Charlie Kroll, it launched a gender-aware digital investing platform in 2016 designed around the realities of women's financial lives - longer lifespans, earlier salary peaks and the persistent pay gap. After selling its automated-investing (robo) business to Betterment in 2025, Ellevest now focuses on wealth management and financial planning delivered by an all-women team of advisors for clients investing $500,000 or more.