Link Ventures Invests Another $5M In Prospecting Platform Datalign AdvisoryLink Ventures Invests Another $5M In Prospecting Platform Datalign Advisory
Despite a crowded AI-powered lead-gen scene, Datalign has strong tech talent, big-name backers and growth.
The AI-powered advisor-prospect matching platform Datalign Advisory announced this week that Link Ventures has invested another $5 million in the startup, which brings the venture capital firm’s total investment to $9 million.
The additional capital will be used to accelerate the development of the company’s machine learning and other AI capabilities, including hiring AI engineers and developers.
In 2023, Satayan Mahajan, a serial entrepreneur and technologist, came on board as CEO. He had spent more than eight years at Amazon as general manager and head of product prior to joining Datalign.
"Financial advisors are struggling with organic growth and the referral engines that have supported RIAs for years are drying up,” said Mahajan. “We're happy to be able to provide them high quality leads matched using AI at scale.”
As is the case with several of the latest generation of prospecting and matching providers, Datalign is using its own machine learning and applying it to the availability of massive publicly available datasets covering more than 200 million Americans and includes granular financial and demographic data on individuals and households spanning years.
All this data is fed into the Datalign Knowledge Graph during the matching process to determine the best RIA-prospect fit.
The startup has also rolled out Geographic Expansion Optimization, an AI-powered targeting tool for identifying new geographic markets for an RIA's services.
“88% of Americans want a financial advisor and financial advice, they just don't know where to begin and our mission is to serve everyone that is looking for financial advice, including people who are historically not good at saving for retirement—we make it easy, and consumers pay nothing to connect with an advisor,” he said.
Datalign was founded in 2022 and has a strong mix of advisor industry insiders and deep engineering expertise. It came out of Cambridge, Mass.-based incubator Cogo Labs, which has been host to many startups packed with engineers out of MIT.
Among its notables are Datalign’s co-founder and board member John Wernz, who is the former chief marketing officer of Wealth Enhancement (formerly Wealth Enhancement Group), a growing acquirer of RIAs.
Link Ventures Managing Partner David Blundin is well known in both the startup scene and advisory world, having been the founding CEO and co-founder of Vestmark in 2001 (where he remains chairman of the board). He was a seed stage investor in CarGurus, co-founder of Everquote and is an advisor to several other AI startups.
And Datalign’s co-founder and first COO, Andrew Johnson, is a serial entrepreneur and currently the co-founder CEO of compliance platform Testimonial IQ (which won a 2024 WealthManagement.com Industry Award in the compliance provider category).
While the data cannot be independently verified, the startup has at least shared some impressive growth metrics (many startups are less open), stating that it had referred prospects having $40 billion in total assets with RIA firms by the end of 2024, compared to $14.8 billion at the end of 2023.
“I'm proud of our growth last year; we've experienced 300% (year-over-year) growth serving over 7,000 registered investment advisors. This new capital means we’ll be able to scale our AI offerings,” said Mahajan.
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