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The RIA's Raising VC Money
Matt Ober
July 07, 2025
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RIAs have been taking PE Money for decades. VC’s are now getting in the mix.
Wealth managers are constantly acquired. Roll-ups in wealth management can be seen from small shops with a few hundred million to mega multi-billion-dollar roll-ups. Whats new is there is a ton of VC money going into tech-enabled RIA’s or tech-enabled RIA roll-ups. From Farther to Savvy there are a bunch now. Savvy just raised $75m!
The PE model makes sense for wealth roll-ups at the right valuation and multiples though I have spoken to many lenders in the space that have said the valuations and terms make no sense anymore. The VC model still confuses me. It’s not clear to me what the exit looks like for tech-enabled wealth managers. I guess the idea is go big or go home. IPO or bust, but the valuations and multiples are getting crazy for a business that historically charges 50-100bps to their clients. Maybe at some point, you manage so many assets that you can then offer every banking product and lending product under the sun to make it make sense. Maybe you end up getting so many clients that you then offer brokerage and trading and crypto, and gambling. But if you don’t do all of this, then I wonder how these VC RIA bets make sense!
For the VC RIA to make sense, we need to see more of the RIA aggregators go public so we can get a sense of what Wall St. is willing to pay for these types of companies. Maybe one of these RIA VC backed companies can position themselves as the Robinhood of wealth management and command a $HOOD ( ▲ 1.83% ) like stock price and valuation. It’s a far fetched bet, but who knows.
I am more excited personally to invest in wealthtech tools. Invest in the infrastructure that enables all the RIAs from the PE-backed to VC-backed to everything in between. There is so many exciting technologies being built for wealth management from direct indexing innovation to compliance to lending, to data orchestration layers, to investment tools. At Social Leverage our portfolio in Fund IV and now Fund V is investing in and doing diligence on companies really innovating in wealth management. From Seeds to Archive Intel to Frec to Koyfin to Alpaca to the data that Fiscal.ai is providing to all companies in the financial sector including wealth management. The Social Leverage team is leaning heavy into wealth management as we have been doing for the last few years.
The wealth management space continues to excite me and our team at Social Leverage. We will continue to invest in strong founders building software and technology and leveraging AI that makes this industry more efficient and profitable. In addition we continue to think about our strategy for RIAs, not only partnering with them, having them as LPs, but also investing in them directly, just not via a traditional VC fund.
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