Savvy Wealth raises $100M to arm independent advisors with AI

Savvy Wealth, the New York-based AI-native registered investment advisor (RIA), has closed a $100 million Series C led by Halo Fund, the growth-stage venture firm co-founded by Qualtrics founder Ryan Smith and former Accel general partner Ryan Sweeney. The round, which was oversubscribed and included participation from Thrive Capital, Index Ventures, Industry Ventures from Goldman Sachs, and Vestigo Ventures, brings Savvy's total fundraising to more than $200 million. The timing is deliberate: it arrives as private equity aggregators accelerate their buyout of independent advisory practices, a consolidation wave that has quietly reshaped the competitive landscape of US wealth management.

The thesis Savvy is backing is a structural counter-position. In the traditional model, advisors who want institutional-grade compliance, investment management, and technology infrastructure have had to sell equity in their client books to access it. Savvy argues that AI changes that calculus, offering the leverage of a large institution through software rather than ownership transfer.

AI agents at the operating core

The platform's central layer is Savvy Intelligence, an AI-powered operating environment that runs dedicated agents for each advisor across a unified data layer connecting CRM, investments, tax, and financial planning. The surrounding stack adds centralised investment management through Savvy Wealth Investment Management (SWIM), in-house compliance, and client servicing support. Together, the company says, these functions redirect operational hours back to client-facing work. Advisors on the platform are reportedly growing their practices at roughly three times the industry average, according to a Schwab RIA benchmarking study cited in the release, though that figure is drawn from Savvy's own promotional materials and should be treated with appropriate caution.

The commercial indicators are striking on their own terms. The firm says it is on track to exceed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) this year, oversees $9 billion in client assets under management (up more than 4x year-on-year), and brought on more than $4 billion in recruited assets in 2026 alone. Its advisor base has doubled in the past year to more than 150 advisors nationwide. Inc. Magazine named it the fastest-growing financial services firm in America, citing three-year revenue growth of more than 13,000%, a figure that reflects a very small base but nonetheless signals exceptional momentum.

"Advisors are being told they have to give up their independence to scale," said Ritik Malhotra, founder and CEO of Savvy Wealth. "We think that's a false tradeoff, and we've spent the last five years proving it."

Convergence context: AI restructuring the $14 trillion advice market

The investment thesis articulated by Halo Fund's Smith positions Savvy within a broader pattern of AI reconfiguring professional-services markets that have long been resistant to technology disruption. Wealth management, with an estimated $14 trillion in assets in the US market alone, has seen its retail-brokerage layer transformed by platforms such as Robinhood, but the fee-based advice segment above it has remained structurally unchanged. The argument that agentic AI can now replicate the operational leverage previously available only to large institutions is the same argument being made in legal services, accounting, and healthcare administration. In each case, the technology's commercial value lies not in replacing human judgment but in compressing the cost of everything around it.

For cross-sector capital allocators, the Savvy round also signals continued confidence in the independent RIA model as a growth asset class in its own right. Private equity's consolidation of advisory practices has created a counter-movement: independent advisors and their institutional backers are increasingly treating AI infrastructure as the mechanism that makes scale without consolidation viable. The presence of Vestigo Ventures, founded by former LPL Financial CEO Mark Casady, suggests established industry insiders are aligning behind this counter-thesis. Whether AI-native platforms can absorb advisor demand fast enough to compete with the balance-sheet firepower of PE aggregators is the strategic question the next 18 months will test.