Aqua raises $15M to bring alternative investments to wealth managers
What's the deal? Aqua, an AI-native startup that helps wealth managers offer and manage alternative investments, has raised $15 million in a Series A led by Arthur VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, with participation from Alumni Ventures. The New York-based company has now raised $18.8 million altogether, including a $3.8 million seed round in 2021 backed by Gradient, Google's AI fund, and Y Combinator, among others.
What's the endgame? Aqua helps financial advisers manage alternative investments for many clients in one place, replacing separate portals, spreadsheets, and emails. Advisers use it to make investments, process transfers and redemptions, manage documents, and handle ongoing investor needs. Alongside the funding, Aqua launched what it calls a turnkey alternative investments platform.
Why now? Chief executive officer and co-founder Rohan Marwaha spotted the problem at Blackstone: more individual investors wanted alternative assets, but existing systems weren't built for that scale. Historically, such funds raised money from a small number of institutional investors writing large cheques; now they deal with far more investors writing smaller ones.
Marwaha and co-founder Dev Patel founded Aqua in 2021, starting as a two-sided marketplace before pivoting. "We started in the D2C space and pivoted as we realized the need for streamlined alts was greater and more pressing in the advisory space," Marwaha said. Today the platform is used by about 8,000 financial advisers and serves roughly 170,000 wealth-management clients.
By the numbers: Aqua's customers include DAI SecuritiesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Arcadius CapitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and Independent Financial GroupDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → on the advisory side, and three of the five largest private fund managers in the world, plus Cantor FitzgeraldDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and T. Rowe Price, among investment managers. The company declined to discuss its revenue model or growth rate, with Marwaha saying only that "we're growing really, really fast." At $15 million, the round lands in a modest tier for the sector.
The signal: Alternative investments — private equity, venture capital, private credit, hedge funds, and real estate, among others — are moving from institutional balance sheets toward individual portfolios. As access widens, the infrastructure to manage smaller cheques at scale becomes the bottleneck, and that is the gap Aqua is betting on.
Read more: thisweekinfintech.com
Image credit: Aqua
