Ritik Malhotra remembers sprinting through a San Francisco rainstorm in 2014, desperate to reach the post office before it closed. The 21-year-old UC Berkeley dropout had recently sold his cloud-storage startup, Stream, to Box, a deal that netted him more than $20 million. But managing his new fortune still meant mailing physical documents to his financial advisor.

“I went from being a broke college dropout to having a life-changing amount of money,” said Malhotra, now 34. “My parents didn't come from wealth. I needed to find someone to help me be responsible.”

At the time, robo-advisors like Betterment and Wealthfront were gaining traction by offering a cheaper, automated alternative to traditional financial advice. But suddenly responsible for more money than he knew what to do with, Malhotra was gripped by an anxiety he compared to the fear of facing a health crisis. His investors suggested he find a financial advisor.

Malhotra valued human advice, but the processes surrounding it felt stuck in the past. Over the next six years, he spoke to his own wealth manager and more than 100 others and found that paperwork, disconnected software and scattered meeting notes had dominated much of their work.

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In 2021, he launched Savvy Wealth to give advisors AI software that could take on more of the work behind the scenes. Its agents can pull from a client’s investments, financial plan and meeting history to analyze portfolios, run planning scenarios and update records for the advisor to review. Savvy now has roughly 150 advisors managing more than $8 billion, up from just over $1 billion at the beginning of 2025, and has raised more than $100 million over the last five years and is valued at $210 million, according to PitchBook.

The growth of artificial intelligence has put the would-be dinosaurs of wealth management– who employ hundreds of thousands of financial advisors and are responsible for $330 plus trillion in assets–on notice. In fact, when California’s fintech startup Altruist announced an AI tax planning feature that would be........

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