Dean Palmiter has been selling software to single-family offices since 2015. First, for Oracle’s NetSuite and then for Sage Intacct, where he was one of its best salespeople.
It was, and still is, a good time to have that job. Existing family offices are eager to improve their operations, hundreds of new offices have been created in recent years, and thousands more are projected to be established before 2030.
But when Palmiter returned to NetSuite in 2020, the sales hill felt harder to climb. Family offices were not as enthusiastic about what he was selling. Enterprise resource planning, or ERP, software is necessary for big organizations. It melds together information from finance, human resources, sales, supply chains, procurement, and more and makes it useful to decision-makers. Family offices wanted those same benefits, but most didn’t have enough personnel to properly leverage ERP software; most have fewer than 10 employees. The offices wanted a more manageable digital general ledger, specifically for them. Palmiter quit to try and create that.
In 2023, Palmiter and Daniel Kennedy co-founded Prismatic and began building a new accounting software that, with only a two-person finance team, could efficiently manage everything even a large family office required.
“I think of these 40- or 50-foot sailboats that you can single-handedly sail. Bluewater cruising boats that you can sail with your companion and without having a full crew, because they have focused on making it so user-friendly and intuitive with electronics. We kind of use that same concept. You don't need a whole staff to manage this system,” Palmiter told Modus.
The founders were confident in the software itself, and the name made sense to customers. Invisible light — all the information from hundreds of a family’s accounts and entities — flowing into a translucent rock and coming out the other side, beautifully sliced.
“I sat down and explained Prismatic to people; they loved it. But prismatic is three syllables. It's difficult to say. And we realized we needed to move to something more clearly identifiable and something that really speaks to family offices and [artificial intelligence],” Palmiter said.
More than a year after its founding, Prismatic had no customers or revenue, and its future was unknown. Visitors to the company website stayed for less than 10 seconds, and it was attracting fewer than one inbound lead per month.
The founders decided a rebrand was necessary to better convey to customers what they were doing.
Palmiter confessed on LinkedIn last week that they scrapped and rebuilt the website from scratch twice, a “brutal and demoralizing” process. “I was really nervous. It took us over six months to come up with the name. We went through so many different ideas,” Palmiter recalled.
They eventually chose Asseta, something with fewer syllables, perhaps more unique and memorable, and that better reflected the company’s expanding product and how it used AI. Then it went dark for months before it reemerged in February.
The struggle and the gamble have paid off so far.
Since the rebrand, Asseta is receiving more than five inbound leads every day and has scheduled demos with more than 15 family offices of billionaires in the past two months. It’s adding a client almost every week and already has 13 total (12 single-family offices and one multifamily office). One client has $50 million in assets, but all the others have between $150 million and $1.5 billion, Palmiter said.
Asseta’s revenue is up 600% from October. Clients are paying variable rates comparable to other accounting and software providers. However, they are still saving money because they don't have to employ two to five controllers, accountants, or other workers that they would otherwise need to, according to Palmiter. Clients are also doing less data entry, automating more tasks, and say that Asseta is easier to use, he added.
The growth has also helped Asseta raise $1.5 million in pre-seed funding from angel investors, wealthy individuals, and some of its family-office clients. The round gives the company more than two years of runway, Palmiter said. It’s actively hiring salespeople and engineers to continue building modules that complement the accounting software. Asseta also does bill pay, document storage, budgeting and forecasting, and investment reporting tools that are native to the platform.
Palmiter celebrates Asseta’s delayed, and still early, traction. But he was selling to family offices well before he founded a company, and acknowledges the new hill he faces. A startup’s rebrand might be successful, but it still has to prove it will be a sustainable success.
“There's no denying that we're young. I think a lot of startups struggle with this. I've talked to startups who are on Series C [round of fundraising], who've raised hundreds of millions of dollars, and they still get the question: How do we know that you're going to be around in a year?” Palmiter said.
The best way for Asseta to assure the small, close circles of family offices that it is secure and effective is to keep its growing list of customers, believers.
“They need to know that we have the right policies, procedures, and measures in place, so that they can trust us,” Palmiter said. “Without trust, we don't have a customer, and without a customer, we don't have revenue. We don't have oxygen.”
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Jobs
- 3i, an invitation-only network of private investors (including family offices) who share investment opportunities, insights and contacts, is growing and hiring in San Francisco, Los Angeles, London and Toronto.
- Citi’s global family office group is hiring a director in San Francisco to serve clients in the U.S. and beyond and bring in new ones, support bankers and other regional colleagues, and be a “marketing ambassador” to the Citi Wealth business.
- Morgan Stanley is looking for a family office business development lead who will work closely with the global investment office (GIO) and institutional securities group (ISG). If you’re “comfortable with ambiguity” and know how to deliver all of the bank and meet wide-ranging client demands, apply. Base salary is up to $250,000 per year, but the total benefits package is robust.
- Apollo is hiring a director to join its global family office team within the client and product solutions (CPS) group. Ideally, you’ve done this before and will start contributing “on day one.” No surprise here: The traveling will be extensive and fluency in Spanish would be a plus. Compensation is up to $235,000 for salary and other benefits.
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