Community as infrastructure

By
Ritik Maholtra
|
September 9, 2026

Announcing our $100M Series C

A year ago, when we raised our Series B, I wrote that AI could give every advisor their own Iron Man Suit: the leverage of a large institution without giving up an inch of independence. More than 150 advisors at Savvy have spent the year putting that to the test, and the results are in.

$100M ARR

On track to hit $100M ARR by the end of the year, up from $10M in Jan 2025

#1

fastest growing financial services company in America (Inc 5000)

6.6x

valuation increase in 15 months

Today we're announcing a $100M Series C at a $600M valuation led by Halo Fund’s Ryan Smith (Qualtrics founder and owner of the Utah Jazz) and Ryan Sweeney (longtime Accel general partner), with Thrive Capital, Industry Ventures from Goldman Sachs, Canvas Prime, Index Ventures, Vestigo Ventures, House Fund, Allianz Life Ventures, Alumni Ventures, and Euclidean Capital all doubling down.

The limits of the Iron Man Suit

The “Iron Man Suit” metaphor missed something important. An advisor’s advantage doesn’t come only from the technology at their fingertips. It comes from the knowledge of everyone around them.

A community becomes infrastructure when something learned by one person changes what another person is able to do. Every advisor who joins Savvy brings years of workflows, judgment, and a long list of client situations that once went sideways. When that knowledge moves through the firm and into the product, it makes every other independent advisor at Savvy sharper.

AI is only as good as what you feed it: proprietary data, live context, judgment, and the accumulated experience of the advisors using it. So the question for any firm implementing AI is: how fast does knowledge travel from the person who has it to the person who needs it?

You ship your org chart

In 1968, Melvin Conway made an observation that engineers still use today: the systems an organization builds end up mirroring how the people inside it talk to each other. In short, you ship your org chart.

Two teams building two halves of the same product who never speak will ship a product with a seam right where they should have met. Wealth management is full of those seams.

Fragmented knowledge

At most firms, advisors operate as individual producers, and often as each other's competition, so expertise that exists three offices away might as well not exist at all.

Fragmented tech

A client's financial life gets split across separate vendors for custody, investments, planning, tax, and so on, each with its own systems and incentives. The vendors didn't talk, so the tools don't talk to each other, either. The advisor sits in the middle assembling it all.

Distance from builders

When advisors are far from the engineering teams building the products they use, bugs and broken workflows can persist for years. Advisors learn to work around them, context gets sanded off in support tickets, and eventually the workaround becomes part of the job.

If Conway was right—if you always ship your org chart—then the legacy wealth management industry has been shipping silos, friction, and vendor distance for fifty years.

We built Savvy to shorten the distance between the person with the problem and the person who can fix it. Three choices did most of that work.

1. Advisors own a piece of the firm

Every advisor who joins Savvy owns their business, their client relationships, and equity in Savvy. Equity ownership changes what helping someone else is worth.

This year a group of advisors organized their own retreat, without anyone at Savvy’s home office involved. One of them raised the idea in a Slack channel and within a few messages they had an Airbnb booked with flights to Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Half the trip was floating the Colorado River and dinners out. The other half they ran as a study group, each presenting their own work: Ed Wildermuth on how he effectively incorporates Holistiplan into his practice, the Colorado Wealth Group team on their process from first intake call to final presentation, Josh Bergman on the ultra-high-net-worth families he built his practice around as an estate attorney, and The Retirement Studio group on helping small and mid-sized business owners. Everyone flew home with something from somebody else.

At most firms that weekend never happens. Teaching other advisors your best process means handing away your edge. Ownership removes the reason to hold back, and every hour spent making another advisor sharper accrues to a company they all own.

2. We built a vertically-integrated RIA

Compliance, operations, investments, billing, marketing, and technology all live at Savvy rather than at 20+ vendors with 20+ contracts and 20+ roadmaps.

The industry's default arrangement pushes the integration work onto the advisor. When custody, planning, tax, and portfolio management sit at separate companies, nobody owns the space between them, so the advisor becomes the connective tissue: rekeying the same client data, reconciling numbers that should already agree, and holding the full picture in their head because no single system does.

That work is invisible and it is enormous. A typical advisor will use 6-10 tools for a single client interaction. And 70% of their week is spent on prep and administrative work.

At Savvy, advisors save 19 hours a week on middle- and back-office work, one integrated platform consolidates 23 vendors, and AI can assemble your clients’ whole financial life in just a few seconds.

As one of our advisors, Steven Harp of Colorado Wealth Group, put it: 

"We grew our firm from $50 million to $300 million in six years, and we were bursting at the seams. Our tech was a combination of 40 different things, and the stack was becoming obscene. Savvy compressed that into a few core pieces, with an easy interface and communication built right into the dashboard. And it keeps getting better every day."

Steven Harp

Steven Harp

Founder and CEO, Colorado Wealth Group - Powered by Savvy2

Every function we pull in-house is one less seam an advisor has to hold together, and better context for AI agents to work from. Agents can only reason across data they can actually see. When a household's financial life is scattered across a dozen vendors, an agent gets a partial view and returns a partial answer. Pulling those functions in-house gives us one unified data layer: investments, tax, planning, and billing all described the same way, in one system of record. That's the difference between AI that summarizes a document and AI that can reason about a client's entire financial life.

3. Advisors write the roadmap 

Many advisors have stopped expecting much from the people building their tools. At a firm where it seems like every request disappears into a support queue and a roadmap written a year in advance, they learn that asking is pointless. They work around the problem instead, and nobody upstream ever hears about it.

Advisors at Savvy expect a lot, because they've learned the opposite lesson. Every advisor can submit an idea for a new feature and vote on everyone else's, so demand is visible before we build anything. Our engineers aren't guessing at demand or waiting for it to arrive filtered through three layers of process. They see what advisors want, in the advisors' own words, can Slack them anytime with updates or for clarification, and follow it through to what ships.

We’re building the infrastructure for a client’s retirement, college savings, and long-term legacy. That responsibility is why we maintain a continuous, direct conversation between the people writing the code and the practitioners actually doing the work.

What $100M means for our advisors

Soon, one independent advisor will be able to deliver what takes a large team and a $1M+ technology budget today.

This round goes toward making that possible. We're putting it into three places: continued development of Savvy Intelligence, more products and services built with advisors for advisors, and more advisors joining the network. Every advisor who joins brings experience the rest of the network gets to learn from.

Here's what that means for the platform.

  1. Automation that completes the last mile. Today we automate and digitize everything right up to the custodian, then hand off the trade or the account opening form and wait for someone on the other side to process it. Deeper custodial integrations replace that handoff with a direct API request and a near-instant response, bringing execution itself inside the platform. The workflow then becomes fully automated in Savvy: an advisor decides to do something, an agent carries it from intent through execution, and nobody rekeys a form in between.
  2. A personal, AI-powered ‘Chief Investment Officer’ for every household. Savvy Intelligence gives every advisor a complete, AI-native view of each household's full financial picture (investments, tax, and planning in one system) so advisors can model scenarios and surface opportunities in minutes instead of hours.
  3. Seamless and intelligent financial planning. An intuitive, AI-powered financial planning experience, giving advisors full household context in one intelligent workspace.
  4. A client experience worth showing off. Investments, planning, and net worth in one place, with the clarity people expect from consumer finance apps and the advisor's work visible in it.
  5. A mobile app that runs the practice. Client updates, planning, and communication from a phone, not just a desktop.
  6. Analytics for the whole practice. Advisor teams see how the business is performing, where growth is coming from, and where it isn't.

AI can make an individual advisor faster. But Melvin Conway’s observation holds true: every system ultimately mirrors the organization that built it.

Legacy wealth management shipped broken incentives, isolated offices, and software built far away from the actual work. At Savvy, we are building something else: a firm where advisors are owners, engineers sit next to practitioners, and every hard-won piece of experience turns into a solution available to everyone.

The product we ship is simply a reflection of the firm we built. AI gives each advisor their individual leverage, but our org chart ensures that community of expertise raises the bar for us all.

author
Ritik Maholtra

Ritik Malhotra is a repeat technical founder with two prior exits (one to Box in 2014 and one to Brex in 2019). Most recently he was Director of Product Management at Brex where he started and built Brex Cash, Brex’s second business line after the corporate card. He’s now building Savvy, a tech-enabled wealth management firm. Ritik is a Y Combinator and Thiel Fellowship alum and holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from UC Berkeley. Since founding Savvy Wealth, and its affiliate RIA, Savvy Advisors, Ritik has led the development of an AI-driven technology solution that not only simplifies advisors' day to day, but also reduces friction in client engagement.

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1 "Replaces 23 vendors" refers to the distinct functional software and service categories that Savvy Wealth's integrated platform is designed to consolidate for an advisory practice. These categories are: team messaging; email; scheduling; meeting note-taking; CRM; custodial services; alternative investment access; cash management; tax planning; tax filing; financial planning; video meetings; email marketing; digital marketing; SEO/AEO; billing and performance reporting; trading and rebalancing; compliance and regulatory technology (including communications archiving and surveillance); document management; client portal and communications; e-signatures; accounting; and cybersecurity. This figure reflects the number of functional categories addressed by the platform, not a representation that every advisor will eliminate 23 separate vendor relationships. Certain functions are provided directly by Savvy Wealth and others through integrated third-party providers, some of which may require additional subscriptions or agreements. The specific tools an advisor can replace will vary based on their existing technology stack, business model, custodial relationships, and platform configuration. Savvy Wealth is not sponsored by or endorsed by any third-party vendors referenced in related comparisons. This statement is for informational purposes only.

Disclosures

All advisory services are offered through Savvy Advisors, Inc. (“Savvy Advisors”), an investment adviser registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”). Savvy Wealth Inc. (“Savvy Wealth”) is a technology company and the parent company of Savvy Advisors. Savvy Wealth and Savvy Advisors are collectively referred to as “Savvy.” Registration with the SEC does not constitute an endorsement by the SEC or indicate that Savvy Advisors has attained a particular level of skill or ability.

This article is provided for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, a recommendation, or an offer to buy or sell securities. Information has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, but its accuracy and completeness are not guaranteed.

Savvy’s artificial intelligence tools are intended to assist financial professionals and are not a substitute for human judgment. The tools do not independently provide client-facing investment advice or make investment decisions. AI-generated outputs may be incomplete or inaccurate, depend on the information available through connected systems, and must be reviewed by the responsible financial professional. Features and functionality may vary and may not be available to every advisor or client.

References to custodial integrations describe technology and workflow connections with unaffiliated qualified custodians. Neither Savvy Wealth nor Savvy Advisors directly holds or safeguards client assets.

Inc. ranked Savvy No. 11 overall and No. 1 in Financial Services on its 2026 Inc. 5000 list, based on percentage revenue growth from 2022 through 2025; Inc. reported Savvy’s growth as 13,086%. Savvy paid a nonrefundable fee to apply for consideration. The ranking is based on company revenue growth, not investment performance, client outcomes, or the quality of investment advice, and should not be interpreted as an endorsement of Savvy’s advisory services. Rankings are not indicative of future investment performance or any client’s experience. Additional information is available through Inc.’s methodology and application-fee disclosures.

Statements concerning anticipated annual recurring revenue (“ARR”), future products, functionality, timing, or other expected developments are forward-looking statements based on Savvy’s current expectations as of the publication date. ARR is an internal company operating metric and is not GAAP revenue. Actual results, product availability, functionality, and timing may differ, and planned features may be modified or discontinued.

References to publicly traded companies are provided solely for informational and illustrative purposes. Such references should not be construed as a recommendation, endorsement, or solicitation to buy or sell any security and do not reflect an opinion regarding the investment merits of the referenced company. Third-party links are provided for informational purposes only. Savvy does not control or guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or security of third-party websites.

2 Savvy Wealth and its subsidiaries do not compensate directly for testimonials or endorsements provided herein, by advisors. However advisors have an indirect financial incentive to provide testimonials.