Valence: Wealth Management Built Around the Client
Published:
Jun 17, 2026
Author:
Louden Richason
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We are thrilled to announce FinTech Collective's investment in Valence, which announced its launch today. We led the company's Seed round, which included participation from Millennium Technology Value Partners, Treasury, Gilgamesh Ventures, and Armyn Capital. Valence is a wealth management firm built around the client rather than the advisor, powered by Salience, the firm's proprietary AI intelligence for wealth.
For families whose wealth has grown genuinely complex, their financial life has outpaced the infrastructure available to manage it. Tax planning, trusts and estates, insurance, private investments, liquidity events, philanthropy, and intergenerational transfer routinely span multiple advisors, firms, and institutions, and the client is left to coordinate it all. Valence's premise is the opposite: as the firm puts it, the complexity becomes theirs to carry, not the client's.
Valence launches in a moment where wealth management firms have struggled to grow organically, with growth staying in the low single digits, and there is little to separate one firm from the next. At the same time, a few forces are converging: the biggest handoff of wealth between generations the industry has ever seen, an estimated $84 trillion, with more than 70% of heirs expected to leave their parents' advisors; an advisor workforce that is shrinking toward a projected shortfall of roughly 100,000 professionals by 2034; and AI that can finally change not just how the work gets done but how a firm is built in the first place. The next era of growth won't come from more products or more advisor software stacked on legacy systems. It will come from a genuinely deeper, more anticipatory relationship with the client.
Company Description
Valence is built for the complexity of high-net-worth financial lives, and it operates as the advisory firm itself rather than selling tools to other advisors. The founding team brings decades of experience across wealth management, financial technology, and company building. Dan Petrozzo, Founder and CEO, was a Partner at Goldman Sachs, where he served as Global Head of Investment Management Technology, held CIO and partner roles across Morgan Stanley and Fidelity, and was a Partner at Oak HC/FT. He is joined by Chief Product Officer John van Moyland, formerly of Kensho; Chief Technology Officer Doron Gutstadt, formerly of Goldman Sachs; and Chief Commercial Officer Erick Goralski, formerly of Stone Ridge Asset Management and Deutsche Bank.
At the center of the firm is a proprietary, client-centric data model that pulls every account, asset, entity, document, and decision in a family's financial life into a single picture. Running on top of it is Salience, a layer of specialist AI agents that keep watch over what moves a household's plan, from markets and tax to estate questions and personal life events, work out which of those things actually matter and to whom, and then act. That takes on the work that never scaled well with people and gives the firm's advisors more time to spend on judgment and the relationship itself. What a client experiences is a firm that understands more than their portfolio. It understands their values, their family, and what they care about, and tends to act on it before they think to ask.
FTC Summary
What excites us about Valence is the team's ambition to rebuild the wealth management model itself from the ground up, around the client, with data, compliance, and servicing running off a single operating core in real time. Roughly $60 trillion in advised assets is in play, and the generational handoff now underway is pushing more clients to reconsider their advisor than at any point in decades. Advancements in underlying reasoning models, pointed against an industry that is structurally challenged with aging advisors, scattered data across firms and custodians, and manual back office work, give the team the opportunity to capitalize on that transfer.
The team has deep institutional credibility and the cross-domain expertise across investment management and infrastructure engineering necessary to win, spanning Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Fidelity, Stone Ridge Asset Management, S&P Global, and Kensho.
Most firms in the space are layering AI on top of workflows that were never designed for it. Valence built the firm around underlying data with agents in mind from the start, which is what lets it deliver highly personalized, proactive service without the cost structure that usually makes it unworkable. We are proud to back Dan and the team as they set a new standard for how the next generation of wealth gets managed.
“We’re not making the existing model more efficient. We’re replacing it.”
Dan Petrozzo, Founder and CEO, Valence