The co-founders of Pro.com, the Seattle-based home-improvement marketplace acquired by Opendoor in 2021, are back with a new company targeting what seems on the surface a very different kind of market: AI-powered software for the wealth management industry.
But Rajalakshmi “Raji” Subramanian and Matt Williams say the new challenge matches the same pattern: a huge industry held back not by a lack of customers, but by a shortage of professionals and tools.
Their Seattle startup, OnTrade, co-founded with former Bank of America chief investment officer Zachary Harl, has been operating under the radar since 2024, raising an undisclosed amount of funding from General Catalyst, Madrona and angel investors.
OnTrade’s chief technology officer is Jean Bredeche, who co-founded Quantopian, the algorithmic trading platform, and later served as a director of engineering at Robinhood.
How it works: OnTrade connects software that financial advisors already use — including CRM, portfolio accounting, trading, and compliance programs — into a single interface.
It then deploys AI agents to handle the type of work that advisors have traditionally done manually, such as scanning portfolios for tax-loss harvesting opportunities, flagging accounts that have drifted from their targets, or drafting proposals and reports for clients.
The humans approve everything before it reaches a client. The idea is to help them serve more clients without sacrificing the quality of their work, expanding access to wealth-management services that tend to be concentrated among more affluent households.
“Wealth management, if you look at the industry, does not have a demand problem; it has an access problem,” said Subramanian, the company’s CEO, in an interview. “Many people who’d like access to wealth management don’t have access to wealth management, and that’s what we’re here to solve.”
Harl, OnTrade’s chief investment officer, called raw foundation models the “brilliant PhDs” of the AI world — impressive on paper, but not as valuable to a specific industry such as wealth management until they understand its portfolios, policies, compliance rules, and client relationships. Vertical AI solutions like OnTrade, he said, are better positioned to connect that general-purpose intelligence to a specific firm’s data and workflows so the technology can do trusted work.
Industry shakeup: OnTrade is emerging at a pivotal moment, two days after investment giant Vanguard agreed to acquire wealth-management platform Altruist reportedly valued at $4 billion. OnTrade’s founders cite the deal as validation of the vertical AI opportunity they’re pursuing.
In a LinkedIn post Thursday, Subramanian wrote that the Vanguard-Altruist deal signals something bigger than a battle over where advisors park their clients’ assets: that capturing the opportunity “requires a new operating model rather than AI-enhanced versions of today’s applications.”
The wealth management industry’s unit of scale, she wrote, is shifting “from the number of people a firm employs to the intelligence and agency it can deploy.”
The founders: Subramanian joined Amazon in the late 1990s as an early engineer who helped build Amazon Marketplace and AWS, and later led the digitization of books for Kindle.
Amazon was where she met Williams, who had founded a startup called LiveBid that Amazon acquired in 1999. He spent 11 years there, including a stint as a technical advisor to Jeff Bezos, then left to run Digg as CEO and served as an entrepreneur in residence at Andreessen Horowitz.
Subramanian went on to run engineering at Yahoo Finance, where she helped open up market data that had previously been the province of institutional investors, giving her an early look at the problem that OnTrade is now aiming to solve.
In 2013, the two co-founded Pro.com, a tech-driven home improvement marketplace that raised early funding from investors including Madrona, Maveron, Bezos and Andreessen Horowitz.
Real estate tech company Opendoor acquired Pro.com in 2021, and brought both founders on as executives — Subramanian as chief technology officer, Williams as head of the Pro.com unit and senior vice president of retail.
Harl spent many years at Bank of America, rising to chief investment officer, where he managed the bank’s asset portfolios and large balance sheet risks across multiple market cycles. He is a chartered financial analyst (CFA), with a math and computer science degree from Indiana University, and a statistics degree from the London School of Economics.
He served on the U.S. Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee under Secretaries Steven Mnuchin and Janet Yellen, advising on debt management, before joining Opendoor in 2023 as chief risk officer. That’s where he met Subramanian and Williams, before making the startup leap with them.
Traction and competition: The company’s technology is already in use at firms ranging in size from boutique advisories to large national practices, said Williams, the company’s president.
He said one client used the platform to win a billion-dollar family office account, and that another recouped the full annual cost of the platform in less than 30 days. He called that “a small window into what’s going to happen on a larger scale.”
The wealth management software market has many established players — such as Orion Advisor Solutions, Envestnet, and Addepar — but the OnTrade founders say they see them as partners, not rivals. OnTrade integrates with those systems rather than replacing them.
That distinguishes the company from Altruist, the Vanguard acquisition target, which built its own full stack, including its own custodian, the financial institution where client assets are held. That approach requires firms to move client assets onto its platform.
OnTrade doesn’t ask firms to replace their existing tools or move their clients’ money. Instead, it plugs into what’s already there.
The broader timing may work in their favor. As baby boomers age, an estimated $50 trillion or more in assets is expected to pass to younger generations in the coming decades — creating a wave of new clients who will need financial advisors, and new pressure on firms to serve them.
That’s where home improvement and wealth management have something in common.
“There aren’t many bigger places, other than health, wealth and real estate, where you can impact a population, especially an underserved population,” Williams said. “That was at the heart of the motivation.”
