Zachary Conway

Ask Zach Conway what was broken about wealth management and he won't hand you a manifesto. He'll describe a curtain. A client tells an advisor their hopes, their worries, the thing they lie awake about. The advisor nods, gathers the notes, and disappears. Some time later a portfolio materializes. Nobody quite explains how.

Conway calls it the Wizard of Oz problem. "We're going to take these notes back behind my Wizard of Oz curtain and come up with my special portfolio," he says, doing a wry impression of the industry he grew up inside. Seeds, the New York fintech he founded in 2019, exists to make that sentence obsolete.

The platform does something deceptively simple. It asks investors what they believe - about risk, about mindset, about the causes and companies they want their money near - and then turns those answers into a personalized portfolio, automatically, with reporting a client can actually read. No jargon. No black box. The advisor keeps the relationship; the software does the assembly.

The reluctant heir

Conway is a second-generation wealth manager. His father, Michael, spent four decades building Conway Wealth Group. That kind of lineage usually comes with a script: study finance, join the firm, inherit the clients. Conway followed exactly none of it at first.

He went to Gettysburg College, took a degree in economics, and - on the encouragement of an English professor named Steve Gehrke - added a minor in writing. That second credential turned out to matter more than the first. After graduating in 2010 he joined Standard & Poor's as an editorial manager, packaging financial research on stocks and bonds. He was, before he was ever a founder, a person paid to make complicated money legible.

When he finally joined the family business as managing director, it wasn't out of duty. He has admitted he lacked passion for the traditional planning tasks. What pulled him in was the entrepreneurial itch: the chance to fix the client experience and run a tighter operation. Inside the firm he spotted the irony that would become his company. The estate planning was sophisticated. The tax work was sharp. And then the actual investing - the part where beliefs should show up - stayed transactional, generic, disconnected from the human who owned it.

Polite disruption

Most fintech founders arrive swinging, promising to torch the incumbents. Conway picked a stranger and more durable posture. He calls his approach "polite disruption" - the idea that you can steer the ship in a different direction without telling every advisor on board that they've failed.

"We need to be disruptive, we need to try to steer the ship in a slightly different direction," he says. But the pitch to advisors is collaborative, not accusatory. Seeds positions itself as a partner that helps firms evolve, an insider handing colleagues a better tool rather than an outsider declaring the trade dead.

His other quiet rebellion is against vocabulary. Conway wants to retire confusing labels like "ESG portfolio." He argues the terminology, not the appetite, is the barrier. Ask better questions - about risk tolerance, investor mindset, personal values - and present a customized selection without the product jargon, and it turns out most investors across every demographic actually want their money to match their beliefs. "Don't tell an investment product story," he tells advisors. "Don't talk about how smart you are as an asset manager."

The billion-dollar sprint

The market gave him a tailwind. Advisor-managed assets ballooned from roughly $91 trillion in 2019 to $141 trillion, and personalization went from luxury to expectation. Seeds launched its platform in 2020 and, within about three years, crossed $1 billion in assets under management.

In May 2025 the company closed a $10 million Series A led by Portage - a global fintech investor managing more than $4 billion - with continued backing from Social Leverage and Blank Ventures. Total funding reached roughly $16.5 million. "This investment demonstrates a mutual commitment to build new tech that actually helps advisors deepen relationships rather than keep them entrenched in legacy tech," Conway said. The capital went toward product, high-impact hires, and a refreshed brand.

Along the way he picked up an unlikely collaborator: actor and impact investor Adrian Grenier, of Entourage fame, with whom he partnered to push values-based investing toward the mainstream. It is the kind of pairing - a wealth-management lifer and a Hollywood name - that only makes sense if you believe, as Conway does, that money should feel like it means something.

He has been making that argument in print for a decade. Since 2015 his byline has run in Barron's, Investment News, The Wall Street Journal, and, since 2017, Forbes, where his recurring theme is wealth as a tool for happiness rather than a scoreboard. The company came second. The story came first.