Yet another artificial intelligence-driven note-taking application for financial advisors has come out of stealth and raised seed money.
Zeplyn, an AI assistant for financial advisors, announced this week it raised $3 million in seed funding. The funding was led by Leo Capital, an early-stage venture capital fund active in India that has made investments in the U.S. and various Nordic countries.
While the terms of the deal were not disclosed, funding came from venture capital firm Converge and angel investors.
According to its founders, the application was built specifically for financial advisors. It is meant to take unstructured conversational data and convert it into notes, thus helping to make meeting prep, note-taking and post-meeting workflows more efficient and fulfill compliance requirements.
It can be used for virtual and in-person meetings and dictation and is integrated with several popular advisor CRM platforms, including Salesforce, Redtail and Wealthbox.
The startup was founded by two former Google engineers, CEO Era Jain and CTO Divam Jain (the two are not related).
According to her LinkedIn profile, Era Jain spent almost seven years at Google in various engineering roles and has a Harvard MBA, while Divam Jain spent nine years at the search giant and has also spent more than five years as a technology consultant.
The founders' experience aside, the startup also has a roster of notable advisors, among them Kabir Sethi, who spent a little less than two years with LPL Financial as managing director and chief product officer (prior to that, he spent more than 18 years at Merrill Lynch, the last five as head of digital wealth management).
Other advisors include Indyfin founder Akshay Singh, Linda Litner, a senior executive at Sequoia Financial Group, and Lora Holt, a startup consultant and former personal finance unit partnership manager for Goldman Sachs.
“Zeplyn enhances our ability to deliver personalization at scale by providing a time dividend advisors can reinvest in client service and growth,” said Trevor Chuna, CTO at Sequoia Financial Group, in the funding announcement.
Sequoia is no stranger to leveraging AI to improve firm and advisor efficiency; Chuna spoke about the firm’s use of AI-driven chatbot developer Cognicor at last year’s T3 technology conference.
To be sure, even with its advantages, Zeplyn joins an increasingly crowded ecosystem of AI-driven applications dedicated to advisor note-taking and meetings, including Jump, UK-based AdvisoryAI (formerly SIFA), Advisor X, Yourstake, and zocks.io, among others.
In fact, Jump this week announced it has been selected to join LPL’s Vendor Affinity Program, a curated list of preferred vendors offering products and technology advisors affiliated with the firm, the nation’s largest independent broker/dealer.
In addition to dedicated applications like Zeplyn and Jump, there has been an explosion of AI-powered technology for client and prospect communications and marketing on all-in-one platforms used by advisors, as well as a profusion of analysts and agents that have come to market over the last two years to help many types of investment firms and financial institutions, from hedge funds to advisory firms, with more mundane but critical aspects of investment research and management.
