Jump, a startup that has built an AI assistant for financial advisors, announced on Monday a $4.6 million funding round led by Sorenson Ventures.
Pelion Venture Partners also participated in the round, as well as several strategic angel investors.
The company's AI assistant enables advisers to record client conversations, transcribe them and produce notes, to-do lists, summaries and compliance records. There are integrations with Zoom, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, and advisor-specific apps Redtail and Wealthbox CRM.
Parker Ence, Tim Chaves and Adam Kirk co-founded Jump in 2022. They spent about a year developing the app and launched it in January of this year.
Last month, Jump won Best in Show out of 11 competing firms and long applications WealthManagement.com's WealthStack Technology Demos competition, part of the Wealth Management EDGE conference.
Ence, Jump's CEO, said the funding will be used to expand the technology base, which will continue to be advisor-specific and highly customizable to each advisor's style. He said the company will continue to develop deep integrations with other popular advisor technology applications.
“We will also invest in driving advisor awareness, as many RIAs and BDs don't yet know that Jump is available and ready for solo and enterprise teams alike,” added Ence.
In addition to marketing efforts, he said Jump would also expand its team. “We're focused on creating what we call the AI-Enhanced Customer Engagement Cycle,” Ence said.
“There is so much admin work for teams of advisors involved before and after every client meeting – whether it's reviewing old notes and data to prepare for the meeting, or taking notes from a meeting and wrangling them into tasks, CRM updates, compliance notes, or then adjusting the financial plan and allocations – these are things that AI is becoming very capable of doing, and these are also things that, while very important , are things that advisers usually don't like to do,” he added.
To be sure, improving advisor efficiency through technology is nothing new. Firms, especially large wire and technology providers, have been talking about and implementing “next best action” through forms of artificial intelligence like machine learning for years.
What is relatively new is the availability of advanced AI-based, communication-focused technologies for solo practitioner-level advisors, smaller teams, and small and mid-sized RIA shops.
The competition, though not always apples to apples in terms of features, depth or breadth, is starting to arrive.
One year ago, WealthManagement.com reported on a UK-based SIFA (now called AdvisoryAI) which was first brought to the use of US advisors by members of the XYPN network. This would be the closest competitor to Jump we've seen.
Jump's founders said that after just a few months of organic word-of-mouth referrals, the app now has hundreds of RIAs and independent broker/dealers using their technology.