InvestmentNews has learned that advisor layoffs have been conducted at Domain Money, the RIA founded by venture capitalist Adam Dell, who is the brother of billionaire Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell.
Former advisors laid off in August from Domain Money described the job cuts as reducing roughly a third of the entire company and “about half” of the financial planning team. InvestmentNews granted anonymity to the laid off former Domain Money advisors.
“My performance feedback was only positive, and I was told in my layoff that it was not performance related. It's a reduction of force,” said a former Domain Money advisor. “It was not a small amount of the workforce, and the majority of those laid off were advisors.”
When reached by InvestmentNews over email, Dell said the layoffs were driven by “improved automation and efficiency” that now let one Domain Money advisor serve up to 150 clients. Dell did not specify the number of staff laid off at Domain Money, which he founded in 2021 after previously being an executive partner at Goldman Sachs.
“Domain Money is committed to serving our clients with the highest quality service available in the market, by combining the best of AI with a human led experience. As we've scaled, we've significantly improved automation and efficiency, enabling us to serve up to 150 clients per advisor,” Adam Dell wrote in an emailed statement to InvestmentNews.
Domain Money had 39 total employees, according to its most recent Form ADV filing dated May 15, 2026, including 14 employees who performed investment advisory functions. The team section on Domain Money’s website currently lists 34 employees, including 13 advisors. As of writing this article, the company's team section appears outdated, as Jeff Neikrie is still listed as VP of business development despite him announcing he departed Domain Money last week on LinkedIn.
“Given these improvements, we right sized our advisor team to reflect our 1,500 member client base, while ensuring we have the capacity to add between 75 - 100 new clients per month,” Dell added in his statement.
Domain Money reported having about $43 million in regulatory assets under management, and its sole custodian is Altruist. The tech-forward RIA operates the Domain Money mobile app, through which clients upload documents, schedule meetings, open accounts, and communicate with advisors.
Domain Money’s flat-fee structure includes three tiers with an annual cost model—Essential ($3,900), Strategic ($5,200), and Comprehensive ($9,000) with each having renewal costs after the first year of $1,000 less than their initial price. Domain Money noted in regulatory filings that it increased its fees as of April 15, 2026, for new clients.
RIAs with other flat-fee and subscription-based pricing models similar to Domain Money include Facet and Range, whose CEO has described plans to replace his human advisor workforce with AI. One former advisor at Domain Money told InvestmentNews that “the AI we were using was incredibly inefficient and time-consuming, and didn't seem to be reducing our time very much at all.” He added that he used Altruist’s Hazel financial planning AI agent to record client conversations at Domain Money for the purpose of producing drafts of financial plans.
“You couldn't make it [Hazel] write it well enough that it didn't still take hours of review to get it finalized effectively,” said the advisor. “I think we were asking it to do more than it's capable of at this point.”
The advisor added that they were part of a hiring push from Domain Money earlier this spring, which spanned eight new financial planning hires who started between April and June. “They had said that it was their largest hiring class,” the advisor said. “They were pretty excited about it, [saying] we're obviously in this big growth stage, doing a ton of hiring.”
Domain Money started offering tax filing services this year through Taxfyle, which also works with Robinhood. Advisors laid off by Domain Money told InvestmentNews that the firm offered a severance package of 1.5 weeks pay plus COBRA coverage for two or three months.
“Just getting through any interview process in this industry at least takes probably three to four weeks minimum, and so I think that's another reason that, when they offered a week and a half [severance], it was just so disappointing because there's just no way to get another job in that amount of time,” said a former Domain Money advisor.
Domain Money originally launched as a crypto and stock investing startup, but the company pivoted away from its crypto identity. In January 2022, Domain Money announced that it raised $33 million from investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Maveron, RRE Ventures, SV Angel, Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff, Addepar and founder Joe Lonsdale. Actor Ashton Kutcher is also an investor in Domain Money, while prominent RIA industry investor Joe Duran is on its advisory board.
In an interview in June with Bloomberg, Dell said that Domain Money’s average customer is 42 years old with a household income of $364,000 and net worth of 1.3 million. He also described how AI is impacting operations at his RIA with usage across sales, engineering side, marketing, and the delivery of financial plans.
“The other incredible thing is how quickly the [AI] costs are declining. We consume a lot of tokens in the utilization of our service delivery. We ingest a lot of documents, we parse a lot of documents, we extract a lot of data, and the cost of tokens is declining so precipitously that really our costs are declining,” said Dell. “I'm just incredibly excited by the disruption in business process innovation that AI presents for our business.”
Adam Dell has founded and sold multiple companies over his career, including personal finance app Clarity Money to Goldman Sachs in 2018. He then helped lead the Marcus retail banking unit at Goldman Sachs until 2021. In June, Bloomberg asked Dell about his interest or potential timeline in selling Domain Money.
“To your point about the institutional interest in our business, we believe that there's no shortage of the large wirehouses, the large consolidators in the RIA space, who would find our business model and most importantly our technology incredibly compelling,” said Dell.
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