Valence, a fintech startup building a vertically integrated wealth management platform, officially exited stealth mode on Monday, backed by a previously unannounced $7.725 million seed round and with its sights set on upending an established industry that its leaders say is too reliant on M&A for growth.
The New York-based company enters a crowded market of technology vendors competing for independent financial advisors. However, rather than selling desktop software or point solutions to existing registered investment advisors (RIAs), Valence is building a fully integrated financial stack from the ground up, targeting families with $5 million to $30 million in investable assets.
FinTech Collective led the startup’s initial funding round, which included participation from Millennium Technology Value Partners, Treasury, Gilgamesh Ventures, and Armyn Capital.
For Valence founder and CEO Dan Petrozzo, the decision to construct an entirely new infrastructure stems from a conviction that traditional wealth management operations are fundamentally fragmented. Petrozzo has extensive experience in the space, having previously served as chief information officer at Fidelity Investments, co-CIO at Morgan Stanley, and a partner and global head of technology for investment management at Goldman Sachs before joining Oak HC/FT as an investor in 2017.
"I identified even 20 years ago... there was this big gap I felt between value provided to clients and money delivered to the firm and to the advisors,” Petrozzo said in an exclusive interview with This Week in Fintech.
Valence's focus on backend orchestration is what prompted Chief Commercial Officer Erick Goralski to join the startup. Goralski previously worked at Cisco, where he managed global relationships with Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, as well as Lehman Brothers and Deutsche Bank. He argues that the widespread industry reliance on mergers and acquisitions is a temporary fix masking a broader lack of organic growth across the wealth management landscape.
“The M&A is a reflection of the fact they can't figure out how to grow, so they’re just buying each other manufacturing growth... that’s not going to work long term,” Goralski said.
A Highly Analog Reality
According to Goralski, the administrative reality for many high-net-worth families remains highly analog, frequently relying on "a manila folder and a spreadsheet.” Valence views client-facing orchestration as the primary competitive opening in the market, describing the landscape as increasingly split into two distinct philosophical camps: advisor-centric productivity and client-centric intelligence.
“If you look at any one of the competitors in our space who's using AI, they're using it internally for advisor productivity," Goralski said. "It's all about how do you record meetings? How do you write emails? ... It's great to make the advisors more efficient, but there's not... an advisor efficiency crisis in the industry. There's an organic growth crisis.”
By embedding the coordination layer directly into the software, Valence seeks to offload administrative management from human staff entirely, coordinating data flows natively across outside accountants, attorneys, insurers, and institutions. To achieve this execution depth without building a proprietary brokerage infrastructure, Valence is leveraging API-first custody partners like Apex Clearing.
To address backend fragmentation, Valence has spent its stealth period engineering a native data layer that it says can process highly complex, unstructured documentation – such as multi-page estate plans – without human intervention.
"In the securities industry, they use the word straight-through processing," Petrozzo said. "We're trying to take information from the front of the process, put it all the way to the back of the process, wherever we can, without a human being touching it."
Orchestrating Relationships
Unlike traditional wealth platforms that pressure clients to consolidate all their capital into a single closed ecosystem, Valence’s deployment strategy assumes that wealthy clients may maintain external financial accounts rather than transferring all their capital. The platform is designed to act as a data orchestrator across those distributed, existing assets.
"We're assuming out of the gate they will have other relationships," Petrozzo said. "We need to build both the technology and the people infrastructure to orchestrate those relationships... If you can tie it all together, value added... should be very, very tremendous.”
Building an alternative data orchestrator is necessary, Petrozzo argues, because single-product legacy systems have left incumbent firms reliant on secondary revenue streams to drive profitability, such as lending and net interest income, rather than on core advisory value.
“A third of [Goldman Sachs'] wealth management revenues are lending,” Petrozzo noted. "Morgan Stanley... most of their profits were being driven by net interest income."
Petrozzo maintains that this structural reliance on secondary products inherently limits how client-focused an incumbent institution can actually be. He pointed directly to the industry's underlying compensation models as proof.
“If you go and talk to any RIA or wirehouse and you start asking the people who work there how they get paid... not one of them gets paid whether the client's happy. Zero," Petrozzo contends. "Ultimately, it's about assets under management.”
By eliminating these legacy backend dependencies, Petrozzo claims Valence can align its operational goals entirely with client satisfaction rather than product distribution.
“The design point is customer satisfaction,” he said. “Everything else is a consequence.”
A 'Crawl, Run' Deployment
Thus far, Valence has purposefully delayed hiring human financial advisors, focusing exclusively on building out its underlying technical architecture. The company’s current headcount sits at 11 employees, with zero advisors on staff ahead of the launch.
“We decided to build a lot of the tech from scratch…but a lot of people don't do such a thing because it's a bit daunting," Petrozzo said, describing their deployment strategy as "crawl, run" rather than the traditional crawl-walk-run progression.
"If you end up with a compromised sort of set of technical architecture from the start, it shows up in two places: your bottom line and customer experience," Petrozzo noted. "So I'd rather go at a different pace... to make sure we fulfill what's required here, than just rush to be able to say we're doing the same thing everyone else is doing.”
While building an independent financial stack is notoriously capital-intensive, Petrozzo maintains that shifting the inertia of the wealth management industry will ultimately require a broader market movement.
"I don't want to compare it to SpaceX... but they decided they were going to do rockets differently. They were out there on their own, and it took them 20-some years," Petrozzo said. "Getting this industry to just really, really change is going to require a whole symphony... I hope 10 more companies get funded... We need more speculative capital to be put into the industry to make it actually be way different.”
FinTech Collective co-founder and managing partner Brooks Gibbins believes that Valence is building a truly differentiated product.
"Billions of VC dollars are pouring into retooling a shrinking pool of aging advisors - copilots, note-takers, digital onboarding, research assistants. The bet with Valence is that you can build a new kind of wealth firm around the client and design it for the full complexity of the most demanding financial lives,” he wrote via email. “We have been waiting for this moment, and so backing Dan, his vision, and his team was easy.”
