Wealthfront takes on old-school finance with $20M from top tier VCs

Wealthfront has come into some wealth of its own.

This online investment manager announced today that it raised $20 million from top tier investors. Mike Volpi of Index Ventures led the round, joined by Chamath Palihapitiya of The Social + Capital Partnership and Reid Hoffman of Greylock Partners.

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Wealthfront’s platform helps clients build and manage a diverse investment portfolio, rather than paying for an investment bank or private wealth manager. You put in the account type, amount to invest, and age, and this SEC-registered, software-based financial advisor will provide professional financial advise at a lower cost. The service also manages the personalized online investment account for you.

Wealthfront is unique among financial services companies in that we derive our value from our underlying software,” said COO Adam Nash in a blog post.  Our core is our engineering-centric culture, which means we will leverage our new financing to significantly grow our product and engineering team.”

The company is built on the idea that ‘everyone deserves sophisticated investment advice.’ It launched in 2011 and has since added features like automatic rebalancing, continuous tax-loss harvesting, differentiated asset location and broadened the set of diversified assets classes. Within a year, Wealthfront brought in over $170 million under management and those assets have grown by more than seventy percent.

This second round of funding will help Wealthfront continue to grow and disrupt “an industry that manages trillions of dollars.” In addition to the investors listed above, lead investor of the first round DAG Ventures participated along with notable individuals. It will go towards product development and enhancing to add features without adding to client fees, as well as to expand the team.

Right now, Wealthfront does not charge on advisory fee on the first $10,000 invested, a charges a monthly advisory fee based on an annual fee rate of .25 percent after that. Wealthfront is based in Palo Alto, California. This brings its total funding to $30.5 million.

Photo Credit: Willem van Bergen/Flickr