Another AI-driven note-taking app for financial advisors has come out of hiding and raised money.
Zeplyn, an AI assistant for financial advisors, announced this week that it has raised $3 million in seed funding. The funding was led by Leo Capital, an early-stage venture capital fund active in India that has made investments in the US and various Nordic countries.
While terms of the deal were not disclosed, the funding came from venture capital firm Converge and angel investors.
According to its founders, the app is built specifically for financial advisors. It aims to take unstructured conversational data and turn it into notes, helping to make meeting preparation, note-taking and post-meeting workflows more efficient and meeting compliance requirements.
It can be used for virtual and in-person meetings and dictations and is integrated with several popular advisor CRM platforms, including Salesforce, Redtail and Wealthbox.
The startup was founded by two former Google engineers, CEO Era Jain and CTO Divam Jain (both are not related).
According to her LinkedIn profile, Era Jain spent almost seven years at Google in various engineering roles and has an MBA from Harvard, while Divam Jain spent almost three years at the search giant and has also spent more than five years as a technology consultant .
Founder's experience aside, the startup also has a roster of distinguished advisors, among them Kabir Sethi, who spent just under two years with LPL Financial as managing director and chief product officer (prior to that, he spent more than 18 years at Merrill Lynch, the last five as head of digital wealth management).
Other advisors include Indyfin Founder Akshay SinghLinda Litner, a senior executive at Sequoia Financial Group, and Lora Holt, a startup consultant and former partnership manager of the personal finance unit for Goldman Sachs.
“Zeplyn enhances our ability to deliver customization at scale by providing time that dividend advisors can reinvest in client service and growth,” said Trevor Chuna, CTO at Sequoia Financial Group, in the funding announcement.
Sequoia is no stranger to using AI to improve firm and advisor efficiency; Chuna spoke about the firm's use of AI-driven chatbot developer Cognicor at last year's T3 tech conference.
Of course, even with its advantages, Zeplyn joins an increasingly crowded ecosystem of AI-driven apps dedicated to note-taking and advisor meetings, including dance, UK-based AdvisoryAI (formerly SIFA)Advisor X, Yourstake and zocks.io, among others.
In fact, Jump this week announced that it has been selected to join LPL's Vendor Affinity Program, a curated list of preferred vendors that offer products and technology advisors affiliated with the firm, the top broker/dealer large independent in the country.
In addition to dedicated apps like Zeplyn and Jump, there's been an explosion of AI-powered technology for client and prospect communications and marketing in the all-in-one platforms used by advisors, as well as a plethora of analysts and agents who have come to market over the past two years to help many types of investment firms and financial institutionsfrom hedge funds to advisory firms, with more mundane but critical aspects of investment research and management.