VastAdvisor, an artificial-intelligence platform built to help wealth management firms find and win new clients, has closed a $1 million SAFE financing round led not by VC firms, but by three people who work inside the industry the startup is catering to.
The backing announced this week came from Dani Fava, chief strategy officer at Carson Group and former strategic head at Envestnet; Jason Pereira, certified financial planner and senior partner at Woodgate Financial, who's a recognized authority on fintech for advisors; and Sally George, a partner at Convergency Partners, whose decades-long career includes experience from Merrill Lynch and BlackRock.
Ian Karnell, VastAdvisor's chief executive and co-founder, framed the backing as more than a check. "It has been so meaningful and validating having not only a financial investment from fintech juggernauts but also having their support and encouragement as VastAdvisor develops and permeates the wealth management ecosystem," he said in the announcement. "We are already off to the races on our journey to become the category-defining organic growth infrastructure in wealth management; this backing will propel us further."
VastAdvisor said the money will go toward expanding its product roadmap and pushing further into the registered investment advisor, broker-dealer and wealth-platform channels it began courting after its public debut at the Future Proof Citywide conference in March.
The company occupies a corner of wealth management technology that has drawn increasing attention over the past two years: tools built specifically to help advisors bring in new business, rather than manage assets already under their care. VastAdvisor's platform combines AI-driven audience targeting, campaign orchestration, compliance checks and ongoing performance tuning into what the company describes as a self-improving system.
"VastAdvisor is a platform that has to be witnessed; its capabilities are exactly what the wealth management industry has needed but could never realize all in one place," Pereira said.
The problem the funding round is meant to address is a familiar one for advisory firms. Referral pipelines don't scale predictably, and lead-generation brokers rarely hand advisors ownable leads or a repeatable system for producing them. VastAdvisor's platform pitches fine-tuned models, trained on each firm's own data, that would let advisors target and message prospects more precisely while lowering acquisition costs and keeping campaigns within compliance guardrails.
The capital raise follows a stretch of rapid growth for the young company on both fronts. In June, VastAdvisor rolled out version 1.20 of its AI-powered growth platform, adding native integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot and Microsoft Dynamics 365. Those integrations arrived alongside a persistent knowledge-graph feature the company calls the Memory Palace, designed to retain what the platform learns about a firm's campaigns and client relationships between sessions.
Earlier this year, VastAdvisor closed CRM integration gaps with three separate connectors tying its relationship-intelligence tools directly into the systems advisory firms already run. At the time, Karnell described the move as closing "the last meaningful gap between where client data lives and where growth opportunities get acted on."
The product work has been paired with a buildout of the leadership team. In early June, VastAdvisor named Jeremi Karnell — Ian Karnell's twin brother — as chief product officer, tasking him with platform architecture and the ongoing development of the company's core intelligence layer, VastAdvisor IQ. Jeremi Karnell previously co-founded Truelytics, a wealthtech advisor-intelligence platform acquired by Envestnet in 2022, and later led Envestnet's decision-intelligence practice as its head of data solutions.
Before that, VastAdvisor bolstered its C-suite with Eli Gassert, former CTO of Truelytics, as chief technology officer and Dr. Edoardo M. Airoldi as acting chief data officer. Phil Gale, a co-founder of the company with deep expertise in scaling adtech platforms, serves as chief operating officer.
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