Seeds, a wealth management platform rooted in values-based investing, has raised $10,000,000 in Series A funding, marking a pivotal moment in the evolution of personal finance. The round was led by Portage, with participation from Social Leverage, Blank Ventures, and other notable investors. This funding validates Seeds' mission: transforming how financial advisors and clients engage with wealth through empathy-driven, human-centered technology.

Led by Zachary Conway, Seeds is bringing a refreshing approach to the wealth management space - one that prioritizes values, transparency, and the emotional connections people have with their money.

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The Problem with Traditional Wealth Platforms

For decades, financial platforms have focused on numbers over nuance. Performance metrics, charts, and cold data have dominated advisor-client relationships, often at the expense of trust, relevance, and personalization. In an age where millennials and Gen Z prioritize purpose alongside profits, this disconnect is increasingly unsustainable.

66% of young investors say aligning investments with personal values is essential to them, yet most wealth management platforms still lack the tools to facilitate such alignment (Morgan Stanley, 2023).

This is the gap Seeds is bridging: creating software that empowers advisors to have more meaningful, human conversations about money - and scale those conversations across their client base.

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What Makes Seeds Different

Seeds isn't just a dashboard or portfolio tool. It's a full-scale platform that helps financial advisors understand what truly matters to their clients. At its core is a powerful client onboarding and discovery engine that surfaces emotional and psychological drivers behind financial decisions.

Here’s what Seeds delivers:

• Values-based onboarding to uncover what clients care about
  
• Personalized communication tools to deepen advisor-client rapport
  
• Automated portfolio alignment based on ESG and personal value profiles
  
• Seamless integrations with existing advisory tech stacks
  

This is not just about ESG or impact investing. It's about behavioral finance embedded directly into the advisor's workflow - helping clients articulate not just what they want to invest in, but why.

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How the $10M Will Be Used

With the new funding secured, Seeds plans to:

• Expand engineering and product development to deepen platform intelligence
  
• Broaden integrations with CRM and custodial systems to reduce advisor friction
  
• Scale go-to-market efforts across RIA firms and broker-dealers
  
• Refine its behavioral finance engine through partnerships with research institutions
  

Zachary Conway emphasized that this raise is not about chasing scale for its own sake but about amplifying advisor effectiveness. “We want to make empathy scalable,” he noted.

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Embedded Insight for Founders: Build in the Emotional Infrastructure

Seeds’ model offers a critical insight for fintech and SaaS founders: while many startups obsess over tech stack superiority or UI/UX elegance, very few build for emotional utility. Seeds recognized that trust is the currency in the financial advisory world. And trust isn't formed through dashboards - it's built through conversation.

By turning human conversation into structured, repeatable systems, Seeds is positioning itself as not just a tech provider, but a human infrastructure layer for modern finance. Founders across sectors should ask: What invisible emotional friction exists in our users' journey? The answer often holds the key to true product-market resonance.

And here’s a detail that many early-stage teams overlook: don’t wait until product-market fit to build your onboarding engine. Seeds excels because it invested early in infrastructure that not only personalizes the user experience but drives its value prop at scale. Founders who defer this investment often find their growth stalling when sales efforts begin to scale. Data-rich, human-centered onboarding is no longer a nice-to-have - it's a differentiator.

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Market Outlook for Values-Based Investing

The rise of values-aligned investing is not a passing trend; it's an industry-wide evolution. According to Morningstar, sustainable funds attracted over $35 billion in net inflows in 2023 alone. In the U.S., more than one-third of total assets under management (AUM) already include some ESG consideration.

Additional trends driving this shift include:

• The great generational wealth transfer, as $84 trillion is passed from baby boomers to Gen X and millennials
• A growing demand for transparency and accountability in financial products
• Increasing regulatory attention to ESG disclosures and ethical practices

Globally, the sustainable investing market is projected to reach $50 trillion in AUM by 2025, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. As investor expectations evolve, platforms like Seeds that embed empathy and ethics into the fabric of investing stand to capture a significant share of this growth.

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Competitive Advantage

Seeds stands out in several ways:

• Advisor-first design means every tool is built to make the advisor’s job easier, not harder
  
• Embedded behavioral science ensures recommendations reflect real client psychology
  
• White-label options enable advisors to deliver branded, values-driven experiences
  

This positions Seeds not just as a SaaS product, but as a partner in reshaping how advisory firms operate at scale.

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About Zachary Conway

Founder and CEO Zachary Conway is a third-generation financial advisor who saw firsthand how the industry often missed the mark when it came to truly understanding clients. His dual background in wealth management and brand strategy laid the groundwork for Seeds’ mission.

Under his leadership, Seeds has evolved from a concept into an industry-recognized platform, gaining traction with independent advisors, RIAs, and institutional partners alike.

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What’s Ahead for Seeds

Post-funding, Seeds is doubling down on:

• AI-powered personalization, adapting communications to individual client personas
  
• Enterprise partnerships with financial institutions looking to modernize advisor engagement
  
• Expanding its advisor education platform, ensuring that human-first investing becomes a practice, not just a feature
  

The goal is not just to help people invest better, but to help them feel better about their investing decisions - a subtle but revolutionary shift in the financial world.