Vise AI

Vise (also referred to as Vise AI) operates an AI-powered investment management platform for financial advisors. The platform spans the lifecycle of the advisor-client relationship: it analyzes a client's investment needs and constructs a personalized portfolio of stocks, bonds and other assets, then provides tools to automate ongoing management. The company is a registered investment adviser with the SEC and presents itself as a fiduciary.

The current product is positioned as an operating system for wealth management, consolidating client reporting, tax loss harvesting, risk tolerance, model management, trading and rebalancing, and separately managed accounts. Advisors can build household-level allocations, place assets across accounts according to a stated placement philosophy, rebalance while clearing wash sales across accounts, harvest tax losses on a daily basis, and deploy cash on a set schedule. Strategy coverage includes direct indexing at the single-stock level, fixed income (Treasuries and municipal bonds, including ladders and duration strategies by sector and credit quality), long-short structures such as 130/30, 145/45, 200/100 and 250/150, and options and liquidity tools including box spreads as an alternative to margin loans or securities-based lines of credit. Advisors can run Vise strategies, their own or home-office models, or third-party models delivered through the platform.

An "explain" layer generates plain-language summaries of portfolio performance, drivers and cash flows, along with proposal materials that compare expected return, risk and tax alpha against a prospect's existing holdings. Company marketing illustrates a hypothetical potential of roughly 3.15% additional annual return, attributed to tax loss harvesting, rebalancing, asset location and alternatives, and labeled as illustrative rather than actual client results.

Founding story

Co-founders Samir Vasavada and Runik Mehrotra met as 13-year-olds at a Northwestern University summer research program; Vasavada is from Cleveland and Mehrotra was raised outside Detroit. As teenagers they consulted on applied artificial intelligence, at one point being paid $700 per hour by a consulting firm to teach finance professionals about AI, and used that income to self-fund the business beginning in 2016, when both were 16. They later relocated to San Francisco to raise venture capital. Their first outside capital was a $20,000 uncapped note from Dorm Room Fund; after an early pitch to Vinod Khosla did not lead to an investment and outreach to roughly 1,000 investors, they raised $2 million co-led by Keith Rabois (Founders Fund) and Ben Ling (Bling Capital), with participation from Great Oaks Ventures, Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg, Jon Xu, Pete Flint and Contrary Capital. Vise launched publicly on the TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco Startup Battlefield stage in October 2019.

Business model

Vise sells a business-to-business platform to wealth management firms, operating as an SEC-registered investment adviser and fiduciary that performs portfolio construction, trading, rebalancing and tax management on behalf of advisors' end clients. It also distributes third-party asset managers' models through the platform.

Traction

By late 2020 Vise reported more than two dozen wealth-manager clients and over $100 million in assets on the platform. Assets under management grew roughly fourfold to $250 million between the Series B and the May 2021 Series C, with client accounts more than doubling, and peaked above $550 million in December 2021. The company's website states it serves over 200 wealth firms and names partnerships with BlackRock, Dimensional Fund Advisors and Alpha Architect.

Latest developments

The company markets an expanded multi-asset platform covering direct indexing, Treasuries and municipal fixed income, long-short strategies (130/30, 145/45, 200/100, 250/150), box-spread liquidity, model delivery, and third-party models from BlackRock, Dimensional Fund Advisors and Alpha Architect, alongside AI-generated portfolio explanations and client market briefings.