Nevis raises $70M Series B backed by Sequoia and Charles Schwab to build AI platform for wealth management RIAs

Speaker 2: Our next guest is from the co founder and CEO of Netis, Mark Swan is with us with another Gong worthy moment. Welcome to the show, Mark. How are doing?

Speaker 4: Very, very good. Honored to be here, so thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: Honored to to have you.

Speaker 2: Thank you so much for coming on the show. Please introduce yourself and the company.

Speaker 4: Yeah. I'm Mark Swan. I'm the CEO and one of the cofounders of Nevis, and we're building an AI platform for wealth management.

Speaker 2: Very, very cool. Is there a particular scale of wealth manager that you're going after? Are you targeting the... Like, the big banks like UBS, JPMorgan to start or smaller firms, everything in between? How have you thought about Yes. Slicing up the market?

Speaker 4: So so our customers are primarily registered independent advisory firms, which make up the other big part of of the wealth management industry. And today, you know, our customers are some of the fastest growing, largest firms in the industry. There are about 700,000,000,000 of assets under management across all of them. And then that's... You know, we add about 50,000,000,000 of assets across those customers every single month. So it's it's a it's a big portion, but it's more on the RIA side rather than banks.

Speaker 2: What is the killer feature that you're advertising to your customers?

Speaker 4: Yeah. So, like, we give financial advisers access to agents that help them automate pretty complex workflows end to end. So building investment strategies, tax strategies, all the way through to the operational things like moving money and open custody accounts. And so a financial adviser on Nevis can actually automate a lot of that work so they can grow their book of business and deliver more service that previously maybe wasn't possible without AI.

Speaker 2: And do you... Are you still working on, like, the intermediate artifacts of that? Like, there might be an Excel sheet or a or a spread or, a PowerPoint deck that gets sent to a client to say, hey. This is the strategy we're recommending. Here's a couple scenarios. We modeled it out all for you based on what we know about your financial position today.

Speaker 4: Yeah. We build actually a lot of that, like, in house. Okay. So so, like, there's tools, like, we'll build our own financial planning tools. We'll build our meeting prep materials. Sure. Like, more of that is actually getting, like, built vertically within Nevis. Yeah. But we also are, you know, obviously interacting with things like Excel and other systems as well.

Speaker 1: Yeah. You said meeting notes. Are you guys doing like a meeting? You have like Call a meeting recorder. Recordings? Like is that something that you brought in house? Exactly. It feels like...

Speaker 2: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. You have an in house solution and not like... Because a lot of them might... A lot of wealth managers I imagine have like an ensemble of tools cobbled together, but you want to be more of like a compound startup?

Speaker 4: Exactly. Like, our our our view of Nevis is like build a platform, not a point solution. So, you know, we we have our own notetaker, you know, we have our own document. Really, the benefit is like a financial adviser can use Nevis' notetaker, leave the call, Nevis has already, you know, pregenerated all the follow ups. So, you know, client might say, I need to withdraw $50,000 in cash, and we'll pick up on that, create the order form, and then one click, you know, complete that execution end to end. And so you can have this like fully connected system as opposed to just like a single point solution.

Speaker 2: Very how capable is the system currently of sort of like idea generation? I feel like a lot of the value that wealth managers bring is not just being a you know a point of contact for execution on all these things and operations but actually knowing that this is the right product. I have access to this hedge fund at this time or this venture fund and I want to get this in front of you because I know it's what you're interested in. That type of, you know, insider information that might not be on the open web yet is a lot of the value of these wealth management firms. Are you working on that type of idea generation as well?

Speaker 4: Yeah. So so we do a lot of, like, proactive next best action for advisers. I think, you know, we have agents running in the background constantly coming up with opportunities for financial advisers. So you should be waking up in the morning going on to Nevis and Nevis has proactively suggested, you know, maybe someone's, you know, move job. Right? And that and that as a result, you know, you need to, you know, change their financial plan, and we'll proactively do all of that work from drafting the email to the financial plan, give you that to the advisor, reach out to the client, as well as investment strategies and so on and so forth. So moving to being much more proactive, agent driven, so financial advisors are kind of given these superpowers as a result.

Speaker 1: When did you actually start the company?

Speaker 4: We started the company two years ago. Very cool. We were... Myself and my two co founders were at Revolut before this, founded the business two years ago, got backed by Sequoia Capital in our seed brand, then, you know, past two years, yeah, we've scaled. You know, this year alone, we've gone from, 50,000,000,000 of assets to to over 700,000,000,000 of assets now across our customers. And it's been, you know, an amazing journey so far.

Speaker 1: Massive progress. Feels like...

Speaker 2: You should raise money too.

Speaker 1: Oh, I know. I know.

Speaker 4: Yeah. And Actually, yeah. And and 70. And today, we raised, yeah, 70,000,000. Yeah. Exactly.

Speaker 1: Wealth management, there's,

Speaker 2: like seven different levels of

Speaker 1: It's interesting because, like, the the concept of, like, AI for wealth management Mhmm. I I feel like you guys are maybe probably the hundredth company to come at this with that pitch. Yeah. But you guys had this massive advantage in that you started like two years ago. Yeah. And that you could be like, we're gonna be able to build all these features. We can do it and really think about this platform at one time versus like companies that have taken cracks at this category historically were like... Are now like, oh, okay. Like, what's our... They were AI for wealth management, but it was really like they were having that same moment two years ago being like, what's... Well, what are we really gonna do with, like, AI?

Speaker 4: I I think also though, like, you know, people people got it wrong. Right? They they said that AI will replace financial advisers, and and they're just wrong. Right? I mean, like, the wealth management is a highly trust first service intensive relationship business. And so, I think the core thesis of Nevis is, how do we use AI to help advisors not replace them? And you have this... Like, you look at the market, right, like the demand for financial advice is also exploding. Right? Like, the number of millionaires in The US is growing about eight times faster than the rate of the population. And at the same time, the number of financial advisers is actually decreasing. And so the question is, like, how do you use AI to make the adviser... The human adviser more efficient as opposed to things like robo or you know, trying to you know, replace the advisor which I think just misses the whole point.

Speaker 2: Yeah. What's the strategic... What's the nature of the strategic investment from Charles Schwab? How how... Like, are you already working with Charles Schwab? Is there someone there that has a vision of how this evolves and you can fit your your company in there?

Speaker 4: Yeah. We we worked very closely with Charles Schwab for for the past two years, but their investment in our series b helps us accelerate what we can actually do with what we call authorized agents on top of Schwab.

Speaker 2: Oh, So a lot of the work I that saw financial advisers do... Okay.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. So what a lot of financial advisers do is actually, like, operational work on top of those custody platforms. So things like moving money open custody accounts take up the vast majority of the manual work. And so through our partnership with Schwab, we can unlock new opportunities to help automate those workflows and, you know, benefit our mutual customers, which are these RIA firms.

Speaker 2: Yeah. You're the anointed one. Well well, Muse and all the other agents are getting banned from Charles Schwab. Are... Yeah. Like, come on in.

Speaker 1: Come on in.

Speaker 2: You get to go into Schwab, which is very cool.

Speaker 1: Love the business. Make...

Speaker 2: Congrats on the progress.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Thank you so

Speaker 4: much for hopping on the show. I appreciate it. Thanks for

Speaker 2: having me on.

Speaker 1: Great to meet you, Mark. Sure. See you

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