OneAdvisory, a wealthtech platform launched in late 2022 that manages client data for registered investment advisors, has raised $8 million in seed capital, bringing its total funding to $10.6 million. The company has also announced a rebrand to Dispatch, a name co-founder Madalyn Armijo says better reflects what the platform does, which is to “dispatch” client data across the systems an advisor might use.
The funding round was led by global venture capital firm F-Prime Capital, with existing investors Fika Ventures, Great Oaks and Twelve Below also participating. New investors included Cofound Partners, Ritholtz Wealth Management’s venture capital fund, Mariner Wealth Advisors’ affiliated venture fund, and Valor Equity.
Dispatch was launched in late 2022 by Armijo, a former director of account management at Vise, Rafi Lurie, a former director of product at Vise, and Rob Nance, a former director of strategic sales and partnerships at Vise and former advisor.
As a former advisor, Nance understood the pain points involved with syncing client data across the tech stack. Advisors typically have to manually input the data into each system they use—or at least their client service associates do. Or, they join an all-in-one platform.
“Our solution to the problem isn’t just another all-in-one platform,” Armijo said. “How do we enable advisors to No. 1: use the tech stack that they’ve thoughtfully built, and No. 2: stay out of the way? We don’t want to be another platform that they have to use. We don’t want them to have to learn this super dashboard that all the data now flows into. We want to operate entirely in the background, sort of like Plaid or Stripe does.”
When an advisor signs on to use Dispatch, they go through its automated onboarding process; its optical character recognition (OCR) technology extracts data from the documents advisors commonly collect, such as tax returns, brokerage statements and drivers’ licenses, and uses that data to construct the client profile.
“As soon as we have the client profile, we normalize or we structure that data, and then we send it to each of the parts of their tech stack,” she said. “The next time that advisor logs onto Redtail or eMoney, their client’s profile would be there with all that data we’ve collected.”
And if a client logs into their Fidelity account and changes their last name, that change is reflected in Redtail, or any of the other systems they might be using.
“If any data point changes across tools, custodians included, we make sure that change is captured across every other tool,” she said.
Some other companies have tried to provide this type of data connectivity, but Armijo says those are more like professional services companies that will hard code a new integration for a large RIA aggregator, for example.
“That has not worked. It’s not scalable. Anytime something changes, you have to bring these people back in to re-hardcode everything. It’s not truly a platform. That’s the biggest difference between us and other people who have tried tackling this.”
Dispatch is not hard-coding integrations, she added. The platform has a translation engine at the heart of it, doing the work to translate the data format from eMoney to Salesforce and so forth.
The company charges a per seat fee to access the platform, starting at $99 per user per month.
The startup does not use any offshore developers, and the new funding will go toward hiring more engineers and client service professionals. Armijo said the company will be announcing some large users in the coming weeks and months, but declined to name them for this story.
Michael Batnick, managing partner at Ritholtz Wealth Management and the fund lead for The Compound Capital Fund 1, said his firm is not only investing but is also a new user of the platform. He believes the tool will solve the problem of lack of connectivity between the firm’s different pieces of software, and free up their client service associates for other tasks. Ritholtz also liked the fact that Dispatch was built by a former advisor, he said.
“I’m less excited about people that come from a different industry—tech being the prime example—who think that software is a solution for everything,” he said. “In this case, I think it is. But being able to invest in somebody that knows what it’s like to be an advisor, knows the pain points, knows what clients are asking, knows what operations look like. It was an easy decision from that standpoint.”