New York City-based, AI-powered wealth management platform Vise comes out of stealth mode.

Samir Vasavada and Runik Mehrotra founded Vise in 2016 intending to empower financial advisors with an AI-powered platform. The Vise platform now serves financial advisors by helping design personalized portfolios for clients, managing portfolios, and providing up to date status information. Vise raised $14.5 million in a Sequoia-led Series A funding. Reportedly, clients onboard the platform account for nearly $800 million in assets under management. (CrunchBase)

Founder Vasavada puts the size of the wealth management industry in the United States at $85 trillion. Along with Mehrotra, he identified a gap in the availability of efficient tools for wealth management. Independent wealth and financial advisory agents, in particular, sorely needed better tools.

Retirement wars

In ensuing years, millions of baby boomers may enter retirement. They would need advisory services to manage their savings, and Vise hopes to plug the gap between the large, traditional wealth managers on the one hand, and inexpensive roboadvisors on the other.

“We did some consulting work and noticed that some people were client relationship managers, but had no tools to gain success with wealth management,” Vasavada told Crunchbase News. “They wanted to be independent, which presented a big opportunity to serve them with next-generation wealth management by using AI.”

Vise’s thesis, therefore, is that AI-empowered human beings can be highly efficient at managing their clients’ wealth.

AI and Vise

Their platform, therefore, draws on artificial intelligence and machine learning and enables an advisor to personalize their relationship with the client. It is a one-stop-shop that manages the daily workflow of a financial advisor.

According to TechCrunch, Vise is eminently suitable for independent wealth advisors catering to clients with assets in the range of $500,000 to $2 million – the so-called “sweet spot” because these customers need extra personalization, and have more demanding needs from the advisor.

In terms of needs, these clients fall somewhere in between roboadvisors and institutional wealth managers.

According to Shaun Maguire, Partner at Sequoia, customers are pushing for more personalization, and advisors are seeking superior technology so they can perform better. All this while the industry is moving towards zero-commission trades.

These are compelling tailwinds for Vise.

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