Ex-Google engineers secure $3M seed funding for AI wealth tech venture

Zeplyn, a startup developing artificial intelligence tools for financial advisors, is advancing its mission to turn the wealth management industry on its head with a multimillion-dollar capital infusion.

The fledgling fintech firm announced that it has raised $3 million in a seed funding round led by Leo Capital, with participation from Converge and numerous angel investors.

The funding will support Zeplyn’s efforts to reduce administrative burden on advisors by streamlining wealth management workflows using AI, the company said Wednesday.

Founded by two former Google engineers, Zeplyn already offers a Meeting Assistant that converts conversational data into detailed notes, automating meeting preparation, documentation, and follow-up tasks while adhering to industry compliance standards. The tool saves advisors 10 to 12 hours per week, according to Zeplyn.

"Sixty percent of client data gathering happens over meetings, yet less than 25 percent of client meetings are properly documented because manual note-taking is time-consuming, distracting, and prone to errors," said Era Jain, Zeplyn’s co-founder and CEO. "Financial advisors spend anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half per client meeting consolidating their notes and doing follow-up work."

While some firms on Wall Street already have in-house AI solutions for meeting documentation, Zeplyn's Meeting Assistant integrates with numerous CRM platforms used widely across the wealth space such as Salesforce, Redtail, and Wealthbox. It's useable for both virtual and in-person meetings, as well as for voice dictations.

"Unstructured data has long presented problems for the heavily regulated financial world," said Converge Co-Founder and General Partner Nilanjana Bhowmik. "With Zeplyn, financial advisors can quickly extract accurate information while staying in compliance."

Beyond organizing real-world data, Divam Jain, the company’s CTO and co-founder says its solution can help advisors keep on top of follow-up tasks and ensure client information is up-to-date.

"Zeplyn enables financial advisors to streamline meeting admin from prep to follow-up, automatically updating client records while protecting PII [personally identifiable information]," said Divam Jain.

Leo Capital co-founder and managing partner Shwetank Verma expressed confidence in Zeplyn's ability to "[enable] better outcomes for advisors, RIAs, wealth management firms and ultimately, investors," as it "brings the wealth management industry into the age of AI."

Zeplyn's announcement comes on the heels of LPL announcing a new program, AI Advisor Solutions, under which the broker-dealer giant is curating and giving thousands of advisors across its platform access to leading vendors in the AI space.

"As the need for personalized financial advice grows, advisors are seeking ways to alleviate the time crunch while maintaining high levels of client service," Greg Gates, LPL's managing director and chief technology and information officer said Tuesday.

For its inaugural rollout, LPL's new platform includes Jump, an AI meeting management platform; Microsoft 365 Copilot, which works with mainstay programs within the Microsoft Office 365 suite; FMG Mobile, an AI-enabled social media assistant; and a transcript assistant from FactSet to help advisors pore through company calls during earnings season.

"As AI capabilities develop, we expect functionality to extend beyond the back-office to nearly all applications across wealth management," said Gary Carrai, chief product officer at LPL.