Technology
Online SMA Provider Completes Multi-Million Dollar Financing Round

A company providing an online wealth management service that allows investors to copy the holdings of smaller hedge funds has raised $12.75 million in a series B financing round.
Investors in the round included Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital, Amadeus Capital Partners, and Bay Partners
The firm, Covestor, aims to get investors access to smaller managers which it says are “more nimble and can outperform larger hedge funds,” according to Sanjoy Ghosh, its chief investment officer. It has over 100 portfolios available on its platform.
The latest round of financing brings the company to a total of $28 million. The first round was used to build Portfolio Sync, a proprietary trading capability that replicates the trades of hedge fund managers, individual investors and other active managers.
The firm is one of many that are using technology to disrupt traditional business models in the wealth management space, which is putting pressure on areas like fees and transparency and forcing wealth managers of all sorts to examine what they offer clients.
Personal Capital, the online wealth management service, closed a $25 million round of financing earlier this month, bringing in BlackRock and Crosslink Capital as investors. Personal Capital’s offering is built around its free dashboard, which helps investors manage their transactions and balance sheet, and then the firm aims to develop advice relationships from this, which are offered digitally.
Covestor has made a series of hires this year, after relocating from New York City to Boston’s financial district in November 2012. Ghosh joined Covestor in May from PanAgora Asset Management, where he was director of investments. Meanwhile, new independent board members include: Jamie Cornell, former president of private wealth management at Fidelity and currently managing director of Bollard Group, and John Sinclair, former director of research at Fidelity and currently managing director at Infusion Global Partners.