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Asseta, the software platform for family offices that kick-started its growth after it rebranded early this year, has raised a $4.2 million seed round of funding.
The equity round was co-led by Motive Partners and Nyca Partners, two venture firms with long histories in financial services startups. Asseta declined to share its valuation for the round or whether it was profitable.
“What I can share is that we are well-capitalized for this next phase and in a strong position to keep investing in product development and client experience over the coming years,” Dean Palmiter, a co-founder of Asseta, told Modus.
In 2023, Palmiter, who previously sold software to family offices for NetSuite and Sage, and Daniel Kennedy co-founded what was then called Prismatic, a new accounting software specifically for family offices. Most single-family offices have about 10 employees, or fewer, a small team relative to the complexity they can manage. It’s common for an office to be responsible for dozens of different entities, investments, and bank accounts, which together require hundreds of transfers every month. Palmiter and Kennedy believed that a two-person finance team could effectively manage everything a family office would require with a purpose-built platform, so they set out to create that.
More than a year after they started the company, it had no customers or revenue and its future was unknown. They decided to rebrand it to Asseta, overhaul the website, and invest in better digital marketing, a gamble that paid off. It quickly added 13 customers (12 single-family offices and one multifamily office) with assets between $50 million and $1.5 billion. The newfound traction also helped Asseta raise $1.5 million in pre-seed funding early this year from angel investors, wealthy individuals, and some of its family-office clients.
Asseta hadn’t begun raising a seed round, but a meeting with Nyca proved they were a good match, Palmiter said. Nyca then introduced the firm to Motive. After about three months of fundraising, the latest round officially closed two weeks ago.
“Our thesis on the space far predates [Asseta]. At a high level, our belief is that there are some really exceptional horizontal platforms, but the advantage with a lot of the tooling today is being able to create the intersection of solutions as well as vertical-specific features. And our view is that the family office sector has historically been underserved,” Harsh Govil, a partner on the ventures investment team at Motive, told Modus.
He also thinks that Asseta’s co-founders and employees have a winning combination of experience and grit.
“Ultimately, that earned insight around what [Palmiter] needs to build, and finding this group of scrappy folks, but still building in a way that I think he puts his name and reputation behind, I think speaks to the type of founder we want to back,” Govil said.
Asseta’s new capital will be used to accelerate the improvement of its accounting, banking, bill pay, and reporting tools, develop others, and establish integrations with third-party software. Client-facing teams will expand, too. The company currently has about a dozen employees, but Palmiter expects the headcount to grow to between 50 to 100 employees over the next two years.
The company currently has 23 family-office clients that collectively manage over $10 billion in assets. Nearly a third of those offices oversee more than $1 billion.
Asseta’s platform starts at $16,000 per year, although some family offices will need or want the benefits (for example, tracking of 50 or more entities) of another tier, which is $40,000 per year. The company says the cost is comparable to similar services, but argues its platform is better and saves offices the cost of hiring additional staff to operate other software.
“We compete by offering a system of record built specifically for this world…Over time, we expect purpose-built infrastructure to become the norm in this segment, and our aim is to define what that standard looks like,” Palmiter said.
And, to Asseta, the timing couldn’t be better.
Palmiter added: “We are seeing more family offices actively looking to move away from spreadsheets and retrofitted [enterprise resource planning software], so we have a huge opportunity in front of us that we hope to seize.”
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Jobs
- A Menlo Park tech entrepreneur and investor, who is managing several businesses and early-stage family office entities, is hiring an executive assistant/family office administrator. "This is a foundational role in an early-stage family office. As the office expands, the position will naturally grow—offering opportunities to build systems, take on more ownership, and potentially evolve into a senior operations or family office management role."
- Recruiter Danielle Becks is helping a single-family office hire a senior investment associate for its publicly traded assets. This person will be based in the Bay Area and should have 4-5 years of experience as an equity analyst at an asset management firm or an institutional investor.
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- Here's a posting that sticks out: "My client, the GC of a large family office, is looking for an attorney to strictly focus on NDAs. Not the sexiest job we have (no room for advancement here), but IDEAL for a former biglaw funds/corporate type who wants to work a strict 9-5 gig REMOTELY from home. Strong preference for [a] person who lives in the Eastern Time Zone, but outside of NYC. Comp low 200K base plus bonus. If you know someone please pass my info along or let me know."
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I'll be in...
- Manhattan all afternoon and evening today for some exciting things. I am interviewing someone I'm profiling, having a coffee with someone else, and then attending a dinner for startups, VCs and related media companies.
- Green, Ohio, for Thanksgiving.
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