Opto Investments has teamed up with tru Independence to provide a broad menu of private investment strategies to 30-plus independent registered investment advisory firms—overseeing some $12 billion in client assets—on the growing tru platform.
The partnership will give tru partner firms access to Opto’s marketplace of private investments across private credit, private equity, real estate and venture capital, as well as a set of customized, exclusive funds created specifically for the tru platform.
Opto previously announced the capability to customize fund strategies for RIAs in early September.
“We pride ourselves on providing fiduciary advisors with the best combination of client service, human talent and fintech,” tru founder and CEO Craig Stuvland said in a statement. “With Opto, we have found a partner that allows us to offer our advisors access to a suite of unique and customized private market investments with leading-edge technology.”
Preqin predicts that the global alternatives market is set to reach $24.5 trillion in by 2028, up from $16.3 trillion this year, and advisors of all stripes are looking at how they can best offer more alternative products to a broader range of clients. The decision to work with Opto was driven by the firm’s strategy of investing its own capital to gain access to market-leading managers and funds, said a company spokesperson, calling the partnership “a synergistic alignment of interests between the advisors, their clients and Opto.”
Co-founded by Joe Lonsdale, who also founded Addepar and co-founded Palantir, Opto leverages Lonsdale’s industry connections and its own capital to gain access to private investment opportunities. The company raised $145 million in Series A funding last fall, and had around 170 clients by April.
"Opto was built with advisors’ private market needs as the foundation of our technology and processes,” said Advisory Services Relationship Manager Nick Gerace. “We’re excited to bring tru Independence’s network of independent advisors a modern, scalable solution that will help unlock the alpha potential of private markets for their clients.”
tru Independence rolled outs its Advyzon-based TruView platform in May, combining technology with behavioral finance and human support to provide a responsive environment for its partner firms. Since its debut, the platform has increased assets from about $9.5 billion to nearly $12 billion—more than double the asset growth reported in all of 2022.
With more than $5 billion in the prospect pipeline, Stuvland told WealthManagement.com that he expects to continue onboarding firms at a measured pace over the next 14 months—but that they will be larger, in the range of $750 million to a couple of billion in managed assets.
“We want to continue to be very thoughtful about how we bring new clients into our firm,” he said. “We’re becoming a little bit more known in the industry, and probably have the largest pipeline that we’ve had since inception.”