Clay here đź‘‹Â CTO of Focal.
The AI meeting note-taker is a commodity now. Summary, tasks, follow-up email… every product in this space does these things. We pick up where those products stop.
Focal extracts several hundred structured data fields from financial advisors’ conversations: client’s goals, their current holdings, their risk tolerance, what decisions were made, what’s changed since the last check-in. That data lives in a structured profile that every part of our system depends on.
Then the advisor opens their CRM (or their financial planning software, or their compliance portal). Our browser extension AI agent is already there. It scans the page, identifies every field, matches them to the client’s profile, and navigates multi-step forms and modal windows the same way a human would.
Advisors who’ve tried 14 competing tools describe us as the only solution that’s actually thought through advisor-specific workflows. One of our earliest customers got acquired, was told to switch to their parent company’s tool, tried it, and fought to keep us instead.
We’re building something people fight to keep. The data foundation is working. The hard part, making it work across every workflow and every tool, is still ahead. That’s what we’re hiring for.
The wealth management industry sits on $144T in assets, $84T of which is moving from Boomers to younger generations over the next two decades, in the largest wealth transfer in history. At the same time, financial advisors are retiring faster than new ones are entering the field. As demand for wealth advice is going up, supply is going down.
The people who’ll feel that gap most acutely aren’t the ultra-wealthy; they’ve got family offices whose entire job is to worry about this. It’s the people in their 30s and 40s with equity they don’t fully understand, 401ks they haven’t looked at since they set them up, stock options with expiration dates they should’ve Googled by now, and parents starting to ask questions about Medicare that nobody in the family is qualified to answer. (Sound familiar?)
We’re building the thing that keeps financial advice accessible—not by replacing the advisors who remain, but by giving each of them the capacity to serve more people, more thoughtfully, without spending half their day on data entry.
Here’s who you’d be working with:
John (CEO) is charismatic in the way that matters at this stage: terrific at getting people excited about things that don’t exist yet, building relationships with people who can open doors, and translating a product vision into a commercial story. He came up through venture capital before running GTM at Modulate, directly helping them fundraise over $36M. At some point he realized he’d rather capture more of that value himself. That’s how Focal got a CEO.
Jerry (CPO) and I worked at Chainalysis. What I noticed then: engineers asked him questions. Not because he was the PM and they had no choice, but because his technical depth was real and his product instincts were sharp enough that the answers were actually useful. He’s the kind of CPO who can hold a technical tradeoff conversation without you having to translate it into business language first.
We debate two things mostly: where the line is between keeping customers’ data genuinely secure and moving fast enough to actually build the product, and what level of polish something needs before it goes to 100% of users. Both debates are ongoing. Neither has a clean answer. If you have opinions about either, you’ll fit right in.
I’m Clay. Big paintballer. Also a cyclist who does hundred-mile rides around California. Every time Jerry has suggested we ride the Golden Gate Bridge together, I’ve offered him an e-bike. (Jerry is difficult to offend.)
The formal version: the founding team has collectively helped raise over $36M and built infrastructure that runs inside broker-dealers, large financial institutions, and banks including Goldman Sachs. Backers include executives and managing partners from Vanguard, Fidelity, Ritholtz Wealth Management, Commonwealth, Wischoff Ventures, and Distributed Ventures.