Marloo raises $10M to build AI OS for financial advisers
▼ Summary
– Blackbird Ventures led both a $2.7 million pre-seed and a $10 million seed round for Marloo, now holding 34% of the company.
– Marloo, a London-based AI company for financial advisers, aims to reduce administrative work and will use the new funds to expand into the United States.
– The company has over 650 paying advisory firms across six countries, with revenue growing over 40% month-on-month for eleven months and near-zero customer churn.
– Co-founders Hardy Michel, Shakeel Lala, and Ben Robertson each retain roughly 27% of the company, with a third of the team having former financial adviser experience.
– The US expansion is a key strategic test, as Marloo must adapt its compliance-focused AI tools to a more fragmented regulatory environment than its current UK and Australian markets.
Blackbird is doubling down on a bet it made less than a year ago. The firm led both Marloo’s pre-seed and now its $10 million seed round, giving it a 34% stake in the company. Icehouse Ventures joined the latest raise as well. Co-founders Hardy Michel, Shakeel Lala, and Ben Robertson each hold roughly 27% of the equity. The next target is the United States.
Marloo, a London-based AI platform for financial advisers, has secured $10 million in a seed round led by Blackbird Ventures with Icehouse Ventures also participating. This brings total funding to $12.7 million in under twelve months, following Blackbird’s $2.7 million pre-seed investment in September 2025. After both rounds, Blackbird controls approximately 34% of the company.
The three co-founders, Hardy Michel, Shakeel Lala, and Ben Robertson, each retain about 27% ownership. The fresh capital will be used to deepen Marloo’s presence in the UK and Australia, launch operations in the United States, and broaden the product suite with the goal of becoming the core operating system for financial advisory firms.
Founded in 2024, Marloo’s team includes a third who previously worked as financial advisers. The company started by addressing a persistent problem: financial advice is among the most heavily regulated and document-intensive professions in financial services. Advisers spend a disproportionate amount of their time on administration, meeting notes, compliance documentation, file notes, client correspondence, and regulatory reporting, rather than on actual advice. Before building anything, the founders interviewed roughly 800 potential customers to pinpoint the specific pain points that would drive adoption.
Today, Marloo generates advice documents, compliance workflows, and client context files, while maintaining a persistent knowledge base of each adviser’s client relationships across every conversation. Blackbird general partner Samantha Wong draws a direct comparison to Canva: a platform that didn’t replace designers but made design work accessible, faster, and more professional for a wider group of practitioners. “It reminds us of the early days of Canva,” Wong said, repeating the same line in both the pre-seed and seed announcements, a consistency that suggests the analogy is rooted in conviction rather than pitch rhetoric.
The traction metrics are striking for a company less than a year old. More than 650 advisory firms across six countries are paying customers. Revenue has grown more than 40% month over month for eleven consecutive months. Customer churn is described as close to zero, a metric that in enterprise SaaS is a stronger signal of product-market fit than any growth rate. Individual user testimonials include a 90% client close rate, a fourfold increase in work rate, seven to ten hours saved per week, and advice documents that previously took eight hours now completed in under four. These are company-curated testimonials rather than audited metrics, but the volume and specificity of the claims suggest a product that has become genuinely embedded in daily workflows rather than a tool that is purchased and unused.
Shakeel Lala addressed the competitive risk that most observers raise first: will large AI labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google build tools that displace vertical AI companies serving specific professions? His answer is that the risk is overestimated in this domain. “An AI tool like Claude can summarise a meeting, but it can’t triangulate the layers of context required to get a usable output that meets legal and regulatory requirements, a firm’s rules, and adviser preferences,” he said. “AI outputs are inherently non-deterministic, and advice is a trust and proof-based deterministic profession.” This framing, the fundamental tension between probabilistic AI output and the compliance requirements of regulated financial advice, is the strongest version of the vertical AI moat argument: not that the technology is proprietary, but that the compliance and institutional context required to make it usable is hard to replicate without deep domain expertise.
The US expansion is the strategic test. Marloo’s strongest markets to date are the UK and Australia, both relatively concentrated, compliance-heavy financial advice markets with well-defined regulatory frameworks and established documentation standards. The US market is larger, more fragmented, and regulated across a patchwork of federal and state frameworks. Building compliance-ready AI documentation tools for the US adviser market requires rebuilding the institutional knowledge Marloo has accumulated in its existing markets, with a founding team that has direct experience in the UK and Australian profession but will be operating in a new regulatory environment. The $10 million seed is sufficient to get the US expansion started; whether it is sufficient to establish a meaningful market position will depend on how quickly the company can replicate its UK and Australian adoption dynamics in North America.
(Source: The Next Web)
