Serial entrepreneurs and two-time Y Combinator grads Dillon Erb and Daniel Kobran announced Wednesday that they have raised $15 million to build a personalized AI-powered financial advisor.
Erb and Kobran sold their first startup, the GPU cloud company Paperspace, to DigitalOcean for $111 million in 2023. The idea for their latest startup, Autonomous Technologies Group (ATG), emerged as they sought to organize their finances following the sale.
ATG, a finance-focused applied AI research lab, is emerging from stealth with its first product, the wealth strategist app Autonomous.
Autonomous aims to compete with the robo-advisors and traditional wealth managers that Erb and Kobran say offer generic advice or charge steep fees.
“We’re not saying that we have an AI that’s going to pick all the best stocks for you,” Erb said.
Rather, Autonomous helps users implement strategies employed by the ultrawealthy, such as lowering taxes by managing individual stocks instead of standard index funds, and automatically adjusting portfolios to manage risk.
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan led ATG’s $15 million pre-seed round through a dedicated YC alum vehicle. Tan partnered with Erb and Kobran during their first stint at YC in 2015. BoxGroup and Collaborative Fund also participated in ATG’s pre-seed round.
The company has 15 employees across New York and San Francisco, and it will use the funds to hire more product engineers and AI researchers.
“The financial advisory industry is one of the last holdouts where human intermediaries extract massive value without creating it,” Tan said in a statement. “This is the right team at the right inflection point.”
In addition to startups like Stash, Vise, and Range, which apply AI to wealth management, big banks are also rushing to embrace AI in ways that could transform the finance sector.
The Autonomous app will launch this quarter and will be available for free to early users. It uses real-time market data and personal context to provide proactive portfolio monitoring and wide-ranging advice about users’ financial lives, including investments, home purchases, and job offers.
While Autonomous provides free advice that users can apply to existing accounts, the company makes money through a separate product called Autonomous Index, an account where users can execute trades with manual approval. It also helps users build portfolios comprising individual stocks, enabling tax savings and deeper personalization.
Though Autonomous is ATG’s flagship product, the company aims to establish an AI-powered financial institution that automates services typically performed by human advisors.
Kobran said ATG is building toward coordinating a user’s entire financial picture, including assets such as retirement accounts, cryptocurrency, and startup equity. Over time, he said it could take on work like angel investments and estate planning.
He said he wants the app to make “everything a family office does for a billionaire accessible to everyone.”
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