Less than a month after announcing two acquisitions, fintech studio and incubator Tifin Group has announced a fresh infusion of cash from J.P. Morgan Asset Management, Morningstar and Broadridge. The Series B raise of $22.3 million adds to an undisclosed amount raised in a December Series A.
The capital will go toward Tifin's continued rapid growth, additional acquisitions and in-development work with ongoing strategic partners to help accelerate their own fintech innovation initiatives, according to Tifin CEO Vinay Nair.
In March, Tifin acquired risk profiling company Totum Risk and the personal financial planning offering myFinancialAnswers for undisclosed amounts.
Also in December, one of Tifin's companies, tax-optimization provider 55ip, was acquired by JP Morgan Asset Management for an undisclosed amount.
That acquisition illustrates Tifin’s mission as a startup incubator and studio.
“Whether it's taxes through 55ip, or personality through Positivly, we are going after one friction at a time," Nair said in a recent interview with WealthManagement.com. "Used independently or as a whole, all the teams in our group are fleshing out and addressing some of the important points of friction [throughout the investing process].”
Tifin continues to attract veteran talent from the wealth management industry including Anil Arora, former CEO of Yodlee (who remains on Envestnet’s board), who has joined the group as a senior partner, and former Schwab CEO David Pottruck, who serves as executive chairman of Magnifi (a startup in the Tifin stable).
In January, the group announced a major integration for Magnifi, enabling the thousands of advisors that custody assets at Schwab to use the natural-language-based semantic investment search engine to import their clients’ portfolios with a single sign-on and daily data matching. This empowers advisors to have topic-driven or values-based conversations with clients around their portfolios, and look at alternatives in real time as needed.
