Vise Startup Story | How Teenage Founders Built a $1 Billion AI Wealthtech Company

Vise Startup Story

Vise is a New York-based AI-powered wealth management platform founded in 2016 by Samir Vasavada and Runik Mehrotra. The company helps financial advisors build, manage and explain highly personalized investment portfolios for their clients.

What makes Vise unusual is the age of its founders. Samir and Runik started working on the company as teenagers and eventually dropped out of high school to pursue the business full-time.

Vise later raised more than $125 million from major venture capital investors and reached a $1.05 billion valuation in 2021, making the company a unicorn while its founders were still very young.

Key Highlights

• Vise was founded in 2016 by Samir Vasavada and Runik Mehrotra.
• The founders started exploring the business as teenagers.
• Samir Vasavada is Co-Founder and Co-Head of Vise.
• Runik Mehrotra is Co-Founder and Chief Investment Officer.
• Vise uses AI to help financial advisors build personalised investment portfolios.
• The company focuses on independent financial advisors and wealth management firms.
• Vise has raised more than $125 million in venture funding.
• Its major investors include Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, Ribbit Capital and Allen & Company.
• Vise reached a $1.05 billion valuation after its 2021 Series C round.
• The company has operated with a relatively lean technology and investment team.
• Vise's platform assets reached more than $22 billion by 2025 and later reported more than $50 billion in platform assets for 2025.
• The company positions its approach as "Wealth 3.0", focused on personalised portfolios rather than one-size-fits-all investment products.

Who Founded Vise?

Vise was founded by

• Samir Vasavada — Co-Founder & Co-Head
• Runik Mehrotra — Co-Founder & Chief Investment Officer

The two founders met as young students in the American Midwest and shared an early interest in technology, finance and investing.

Rather than following a traditional educational path, they decided to focus on building their company.

Samir Vasavada — Co-Founder

Samir Vasavada is the co-founder and current co-head of Vise.

He started coding and experimenting with financial technology at a very young age.

Samir eventually dropped out of high school to pursue Vise full-time.

His focus has been product development, company strategy and building Vise into a technology platform for financial advisors.

Runik Mehrotra — Co-Founder

Runik Mehrotra is Vise's co-founder and Chief Investment Officer.

He shared Samir's early interest in investing and quantitative finance.

At Vise, Runik has focused heavily on investment strategy, portfolio construction and the technology required to automate personalised investing.

What Does Vise Do?

Vise provides technology that helps financial advisors create and manage personalised investment portfolios.

Traditionally, an advisor managing hundreds or thousands of clients may have to manually consider:

• Risk tolerance

• Investment objectives

• Tax situations

• Existing holdings

• Individual stock preferences

• Portfolio restrictions

• Rebalancing

• Tax-loss harvesting

Vise automates many of these processes.

The advisor remains responsible for the client relationship and investment strategy, while Vise provides the technology and investment-management infrastructure.

How Does Vise Use AI?

Vise uses artificial intelligence and investment technology to help advisors construct and manage portfolios.

The platform can help with

• Portfolio construction
• Portfolio customisation
• Automated rebalancing
• Tax optimisation
• Tax-loss harvesting
• Direct indexing
• Investment analysis
• Client portfolio explanations

The goal is to allow advisors to provide individually customised portfolios without manually managing every portfolio from scratch.

What Is Wealth 3.0?

Vise describes its approach as "Wealth 3.0."

The idea is that wealth management has evolved through different stages.

Wealth 1.0 was largely based around mutual funds.

Wealth 2.0 expanded into ETFs and index-based products.

Wealth 3.0 aims to provide personalised portfolios containing individual securities that can be customised around each client's goals, taxes and preferences.

This is where Vise believes AI can create a significant advantage.

Vise's Early Journey

The founders spent several years building Vise before raising major institutional funding.

They initially bootstrapped the company and focused on talking to potential customers and building the product.

According to Samir, the founders spent years iterating before the company gained meaningful traction.

The company eventually grew from almost no assets under management to hundreds of millions of dollars before its major venture rounds.

The founders' persistence was important because convincing established financial institutions to trust two teenage founders was not easy.

Vise Funding

Vise has raised more than $125 million in publicly reported venture funding.

Its major investors include

• Sequoia Capital
• Founders Fund
• Ribbit Capital
• Allen & Company
• Bling Capital
• Bond
• Contrary

One of its most important funding rounds was the $65 million Series C announced in 2021.

The round valued Vise at approximately $1.05 billion.

Vise's Unicorn Valuation

Vise became a unicorn after its 2021 Series C round.

The company was valued at approximately

$1.05 billion

This was a remarkable milestone considering that the founders had started the company as teenagers only a few years earlier.

However, Vise's own later reflections show that the rapid increase in valuation also created challenges.

The company began paying too much attention to external indicators such as valuation, fundraising and employee count.

The founders later described this period as a distraction from the core business.

The Major Strategic Reset

One of the most important parts of Vise's story came after its rapid growth.

The company had expanded its team significantly and hired experienced executives.

However, the founders later concluded that the organisation had become too focused on growth metrics and not enough on its core product and customers.

Vise subsequently went through a major reset.

The company reduced its team and returned its focus to

• Product
• Customers
• Engineering
• Investment technology
• Independent advisors
• Sustainable growth

This "refounding" became an important lesson for the founders.

Vise's Platform Growth

Vise has experienced significant growth in platform assets.

In September 2024, the company reported more than $3.5 billion in platform assets.

By 2025, Vise reported more than $22 billion in platform assets.

The company later reported that platform assets grew to more than $50 billion during 2025.

Platform assets are not the same as company revenue or valuation. They represent assets connected to or managed through the Vise platform.

Why Is Vise Different?

Traditional wealth-management technology often provides standardised investment products.

Vise instead focuses on individual portfolio construction.

For example, two clients using the same financial advisor can have completely different portfolios based on:

• Income

• Risk tolerance

• Taxes

• Existing investments

• Financial goals

• ESG preferences

• Concentrated positions

• Liquidity requirements

Vise's technology is designed to help advisors manage this level of personalisation at scale.

Vise's Business Model

Vise operates as a technology-powered investment management platform.

Its primary customers are financial advisors and wealth management firms rather than individual retail investors.

The platform helps advisors improve

• Portfolio management
• Investment personalisation
• Tax management
• Operational efficiency
• Client communication

This B2B model allows Vise to become infrastructure for financial advisory businesses.

Vise's Competitive Advantage

Personalisation at Scale

The biggest advantage is the ability to customise portfolios without requiring advisors to manually manage every security decision.

AI and Automation

Technology automates repetitive portfolio-management processes.

Tax Optimisation

Vise incorporates tax considerations into portfolio construction and management.

Advisor-Focused Model

Rather than trying to replace financial advisors, Vise positions its technology as a tool that helps advisors serve more clients.

Lean Team

The company has demonstrated that significant platform assets can be supported by a relatively small technology and investment team.

Vise's Biggest Challenges

Trust in Financial Services

Financial advisors are handling clients' money, making trust and reliability critical.

Complexity

Managing personalised portfolios across different asset classes, tax situations and restrictions is technically difficult.

Competition

Vise competes with established wealth-management technology companies as well as newer AI and direct-indexing platforms.

Growth vs Efficiency

The company's rapid expansion taught the founders that raising large amounts of capital and hiring quickly does not automatically create a better business.

Market Adoption

Financial advisors need to be convinced that AI can improve their workflows without compromising investment quality or client relationships.

The Teenage Founder Advantage

One of the most unusual aspects of Vise's story is that its founders started the company extremely young.

They did not have decades of experience in finance.

Instead, they approached the industry from a technology-first perspective.

This allowed them to question traditional processes and think about how software and AI could change portfolio management.

At the same time, their lack of experience created challenges when they had to convince established financial professionals and investors to trust them.

What Can Startups Learn From Vise?

Start Before You Feel Ready

Samir and Runik began experimenting with their business as teenagers.

Customer Feedback Matters

The founders spent years talking to potential customers and iterating on the product.

Don't Confuse Funding With Progress

Vise's founders later acknowledged that fundraising, valuation and employee growth became distractions.

Stay Close to the Core Product

The company eventually returned its focus to customers, engineering and its core investment technology.

Build for a Large Structural Problem

Vise is targeting a major wealth-management industry where advisors need to deliver more personalisation without dramatically increasing operational complexity.

Use Technology to Increase Human Capability

Vise does not position AI as a replacement for financial advisors. Instead, it aims to make advisors more capable and efficient.

Vise's Growth Formula

Vise's journey can be simplified into

Technology + AI + Personalisation + Financial Advisors = Wealth Management at Scale

The company identified a problem in traditional wealth management

Personalisation was expensive and difficult to scale.

Vise's solution is to use software and AI to automate much of the work while allowing advisors to maintain the human relationship with clients.

Summary Takeaway

💡 Key Takeaway:

• Vise shows how two teenage founders turned an unconventional idea into a billion-dollar wealthtech company by combining AI, investment technology and a deep focus on personalised portfolios.

Founded by Samir Vasavada and Runik Mehrotra in 2016, Vise raised more than $125 million from major investors and reached a $1.05 billion valuation in 2021. Its platform later grew to tens of billions of dollars in assets.

The founders' journey also demonstrates an important lesson beyond the unicorn valuation:

Raising money and becoming a unicorn is not the finish line. Building a durable company requires staying close to customers, controlling execution and continuously returning to the problem you set out to solve.**