Jump, a startup that has built an AI assistant for financial advisors, announced Monday a $4.6 million funding round led by Sorenson Ventures.
Pelion Venture Partners also participated in the round, as did several strategic angel investors.
The company’s AI assistant enables advisors to record client conversations, transcribe them, and produce notes, task lists, summaries and compliance records. It has integrations with Zoom, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce and the advisor-specific Redtail and Wealthbox CRM applications.
Parker Ence, Tim Chaves and Adam Kirk cofounded Jump in 2022. They spent about a year developing the application and launched it in January of this year.
Last month, Jump won Best in Show out of 11 competing firms and applications during 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 on the technology’s foundation, which will continue to be advisor-specific and highly customizable to each advisor’s style. He said the company would 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,” Ence added.
In addition to marketing efforts, he said Jump also would be expanding its team. “We are focused on creating what we call the AI-Enhanced Client Meeting Cycle,” said Ence.
“There is so much admin work for advisor teams tied up in the before and after of every client meeting—whether it is reviewing old notes and data to prepare for the meeting, or taking the 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 getting very capable of doing, and these are also things that, while they are very important, are things advisors typically do not enjoy doing,” he added.
Jump charges on a per user basis, with most advisors paying between $100 and $120 per advisor, per month (there is some leeway for advisors who are interested but are just getting their practices started, Ence said).
To be sure, improving advisor efficiency through technology is nothing new. Firms, especially wirehouses and large technology providers, have talked about and implemented “next best action” through forms of artificial intelligence like machine learning for years now.
What is relatively new is the availability of advanced AI-based communications-focused technologies to advisors downstream to the level of solo practitioners, smaller teams and small to midsize RIA shops.
Competition, while not always apples to apples in terms of features, depth or breadth, has started to arrive.
A year ago, WealthManagement.com reported on a UK-based SIFA (now called AdvisoryAI), which had been first brought to U.S. advisor use by members of the XYPN network. This would be the closest competitor to Jump we have yet seen.
Jump’s founders said that after just a few months of organic word-of-mouth referrals, the application now has hundreds of RIA and independent broker/dealers using their technology.