Wealthbox, an 8-year-old client relationship management platform for financial advisors, on Tuesday announced a $31 million Series B funding lead by private equity firm Frontier Growth.
Wealthbox co-founder and CEO John Rourke said the new resources will be channeled towards accelerated product development.
Rourke wrote in an email, “A major focus for Wealthbox this year will be on adequately hiring our sales, marketing and biz-dev teams – we plan to hire approximately 35 people this year, About a third will be engineers.” The firm currently has 50 employees and offices in Providence, RI and New York City.
Starburst Labs and Wealthbox raised their $6.2 million Series A round in January 2017 and was led by Bell45 Capital Partners, which invested $5 million. Before the Series B round was announced on Tuesday, the firm had raised a total of $12 million.
Rourke said this time turning to private equity instead of venture capital to invest in Wealthbox and its parent Starburst Labs allowed for more flexibility in deploying the fund.
“The Growth Equity Route and the Minority Investment” [by Frontier Growth] Makes the most sense for Wealthbox because it provides some liquidity for past investors, but allows investors and management to put most of our chips on the table,” he said.
“And with Frontier Growth as our partner, Wealthbox can also explore acquisition opportunities down the road.”
Wealthbox, which is used by about 14,000 advisors with a paid subscription, has third-party advisory technology applications, as well as 92 integrations with three of the four top custodians (a Pershing integration is in the works, according to Rourke). said).
Rourke said the 15 integrations allow for “bi-directional” data flow, useful for advisory workflows because data can be shared between programs, and more will be added as needed.
“Through our API, our partners can build deep integration with Wealthbox – which includes two-way data flow as data can be read and written through the API,” he said.
“In our opinion, the best integrations enable workflows for users that they could not complete on their own, such as viewing financial account data with one’s tasks and upcoming meetings with clients, pre-filling account opening forms, and Starting workflow processes directly from a client’s inbound email,” Rourke said.
According to Rourke, the software regularly makes the short list of options for wealth management firms looking to become independent or looking for a new CRM, and its two biggest competitors are RedTel Technology and Salesforce.
Wealthbox has offerings for both small RIAs or those just getting started, as well as enterprise-sized stores, whether RIAs, rollups, or independent broker/dealers.
For financial advisors, costs range from a basic license of $35 per user per month (or $420 annually per user) to $65 per user per month, billed annually for the firm’s full range of advanced services (or $780 annually per user). it occurs.
