Luminary, an artificial intelligence-native wealth transfer and administration platform, which launched in 2022, has raised $22 million in Series A funding led by Ten Coves Capital, bringing the company’s total funding to nearly $32 million.
The round included participation from BNY and 8VC, which led Luminary’s $9.5 million seed round in 2023, alongside previous investors Fin Capital, Focus Financial Partners, Rockefeller Capital Management’s FinTech Innovation Fund and several family offices.
David Barnard, founder and chief executive officer of Luminary, said that the firm’s mission is to democratize the kind of advice and service previously accessible only to a select few, mainly through family offices or multi-family offices.
“It’s really a data problem,” said Barnard in an interview with Wealth Management.
Historically, it has been a challenge to aggregate and analyze all the data and context around HNW clients’ complex financial situations. Barnard said it requires artificial intelligence to make automation and creation of advisory workflows practical.
Luminary’s platform ingests static estate documents and turns them into structured, source-verified data that powers workflows for financial advisors, trust companies, law firms and accounting firms, helping them scale ongoing guidance on tax-efficient wealth transfer strategy, trust and entity structuring and administration.
Barnard said that 80% of its team is made up of engineers, about 20 in all, and all are U.S.-based employees.
Barnard said that the new capital will enable Luminary to continue building out its AI capabilities and integrations and to expand administrative workflows. He said the company also plans to grow its sales and business development teams.
“We aren’t trying to make advisors into a Swiss army knife; we want them to be the quarterback in their client’s financial life and able to drive those long-term planning and wealth transfer planning conversations proactively and make that part of the ongoing conversation and relationship,” said Barnard.
He pointed out that tools like Luminary can help HNW advisors keep a family’s strategic plan aligned with its generational and charitable intent.
According to the company, Luminary already supports client assets totaling more than $500 billion, and the fresh capital is intended to help it build on its AI capabilities and integrations, expand into administration workflows and add to its commercial team.
Among Luminary’s customers are Caprock, IEQ Capital and Wealth Enhancement Group, as well as tax advisory practices, legal practices and trust companies.
“We are focused on identifying emerging technologies that can help address real challenges across financial services. Luminary brings a distinctive approach to wealth transfer and estate planning – an area of wealth tech where modern infrastructure can help advisors better serve high-net-worth clients,” wrote Marianna Lopert-Schaye, Global Head of Strategic Partnerships, Investments and Innovation at BNY in a statement.
“Sophisticated trust and estate strategy has historically been available to the ultra-wealthy on a one-off basis, running on spreadsheets, PDFs and institutional memory,” wrote Joe Lonsdale, founder and managing partner at 8VC, in a statement. Lonsdale also founded Addepar, Opto Investments and Palantir.