San Francisco startup Compound has raised $37 million, including a $25 million Series B led by Greenoaks and Lachy Groom, ahead of the launch Thursday of its asset management platform geared toward founders and tech industry types.
Its other investors include Egon Durban (Silver Lake), Sam Bankman-Fried (FTX), Y Combinator, XYZ, SciFi, Day One Ventures and several other individuals.
The firm was founded in 2019 by CEO Jordan Gonen and CTO Jacob Schein to help those in the tech industry manage a complicated array of assets, which include equities, cryptocurrencies and NFTs amid a financial landscape that has a lot more options, some more volatile than others, than even a decade ago.
"I think that everyone in the technology industry struggles with managing their finances and today there's no reliable solution that really speaks to them. Oftentimes more traditional firms are built for a different type of audience that has a very different balance sheet and goals and risk preferences," Gonen told me. "Compound is really, in my view, the first solution specifically designed for this next generation of wealth. And our plans are to scale with that generation for their entire lives."
Gonen, 24, started building Compound the same year he graduated from the University of Washington in St. Louis where he studied computer science and finance. He also spent some time at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Before founding Compound, Gonen worked at Uber and Blend as well as a couple of startups, namely RealtyShares (a real estate investment platform that was acquired by New York-based iintoo in 2019) and Scaphold (a backend SaaS platform that was acquired by Amazon in 2017).
He found himself struggling to fully understand and manage his own assets and realized that there weren't any good options that catered to the specific needs of tech industry and startup workers.
Compound is essentially a wealth management and financial adviser platform. It integrates with other financial services to create of broad overview of a user's assets, and it also has a team of human advisors that help create personalized recommendations for a suite of services that include more traditional financial planning around things like tax preparation and taking on debt, as well as managing equity from a startup, planning around an IPO, and dealing with alternative assets like cryptocurrency and NFTs.
Depending on the complexity of their assets and needs, Compound charges users a subscription fee which can range from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars annually, Gonen said.
The company currently has about 50 employees and hundred of users and will continue building out its team, platform and services over the next year.
