Wealthbox, the eight-year-old customer relationship management platform for financial advisors, announced Tuesday a $31 million Series B round of funding led by private equity firm Frontier Growth.
John Rourke, co-founder and CEO of Wealthbox, said the new resources would be put toward accelerated product development.
“A big focus for Wealthbox this year will be substantially staffing up our sales, marketing and biz-dev teams—we plan on hiring about 35 people this year, about a third will be engineers,” Rourke wrote in an email. The firm currently has 50 employees and offices in Providence, R.I., and New York City.
Starburst Labs and Wealthbox raised a $6.2 million Series A round in January 2017 and were led by Bel45 Capital Partners, which invested $5 million. Prior to Tuesday's announcement of the Series B round, the firm had raised a total of $12 million.
Rourke said turning to private equity this time around for an investment in Wealthbox and its parent, Starburst Labs, rather than venture capital, allowed for more flexibility in deploying the funds.
“The growth equity route and this minority investment [by Frontier Growth] made the most sense for Wealthbox as it provides some liquidity for previous investors but also allowed investors and management to keep most of our chips on the table,” he said.
“And with Frontier Growth as our partner, Wealthbox might also explore acquisition opportunities down the road.”
Wealthbox, which is used by almost 14,000 advisors with paid subscriptions, according to Rourke, has 92 integrations with third-party advisor technology applications as well as three of the four top custodians (a Pershing integration is in the works, he said).
Rourke said that 15 of the integrations allow for "bi-directional" data flow, useful for advisor workflow as data can be shared between the programs, and that more will be added as needed.
“Through our API, our partners can build deep integrations with Wealthbox—including two-way data flows since data can be read and written via the API,” he said.
“In our opinion, the best integrations enable workflows for users they couldn’t have completed on their own, like seeing financial account data alongside one's tasks and upcoming meetings with a client, pre-filling account opening forms and kicking off workflow processes directly from an inbound email from a client,” said Rourke.
The software regularly makes the short list of choices among wealth management firms going independent or looking for new CRM, and its two biggest competitors are Redtail Technology and Salesforce, according to Rourke.
Wealthbox has offerings available for both smaller RIAs or those just getting started as well as enterprise-size shops, whether RIAs, rollups or independent broker/dealers.
For financial advisors, costs range from a basic license of $35 per user per month billed annually (or $420 annually per user) to $65 per user per month billed annually for the firm’s full array of advanced services (or $780 annually per user).
