Anna Joo Fee had a problem.
The Wall Street lawyer was so busy in her job that managing her wealth adequately was difficult.
Her options were limited, however. Institutions wanted the capital that high earners could offer, but were not best placed to serve the market. And she wasn’t confident in her own knowledge to do the job herself.
So she created Goodfin, an artificial intelligence-led investment platform that sought to straddle the gap.
That was four years ago. Now, Goodfin is so successful that capital markets participants and family offices are taking advantage of its technology and research to access private assets and investment structures themselves.
“The whole mission behind Goodfin is really my personal mission, which is now bigger and broader because we are growing so fast and have customers who are more important than myself in terms of solving their pain points,” Fee tells Data Management Insight. “But really, it started just because I wanted it out in the world.”
Agentic AI Channels Capital to High-Growth Opportunities
Goodfin deploys AI agents to the task of enabling high earners to invest in private markets, in particular high-growth pre-IPO technology, healthcare, defence, space and robotics businesses.
While Goodfin says it is committed to using AI to “hyper-personalise” the investment experience, its Goodfin Go agentic platform is also offered to asset managers, wealth advisers, banks and family offices. The platform uses generative AI to enhance efficiency, curate deal flow and scale access to a previously underserved wellspring of capital, Fee said.Goodfin is Fee’s second startup. She formed it four years ago out of the Y Combinator venture programme that has fostered household tech names like Airbnb, Reddit, Coinbase and Gusto. The inspiration came from her first company, a trading platform she created after leaving her legal job.
“I had the courage to leave the law firm because I was just itching to start something,” she says. “I decided it wasn’t what I wanted to do for the next 40 years of my life.”
It was while running that business that she realised she could bring the right pieces together to bridge the wealth investment gap she’d encountered. She initially chose to go into private markets because she found the big investment houses didn’t have the expertise to do it.Now she is reaping the benefit of a surge of interest in alternative assets that is drawing in record amounts of capital from institutions.
Getting the Data Right is Non-Negotiable
Fee characterises Goodfin as a “next-gen private wealth platform”. Its 30-plus AI agents orchestrate the data onboarding and management as well as the investment and sales operations.
Robust guardrails are in place with continuous human checks ensuring accuracy and compliance.
“The answers have to be right,” Fee says. “They have to be reliable, the data that we’re looking at has to be pre-vetted.”
For capital markets participants, Fee says Goodfin provides a conduit to often hard-to-reach private placements, tapping into its curated network of accredited individual investors and sophisticated family offices.
For investment banks and wealth managers advising clients on alternative investments, the platform offers access to a carefully “curated selection for long-term investing”, she says.
Goodfin Go ingests a wide range of datasets, including user-provided insights and private-market data providers like CapLite, to news feeds and investment memos.
Fee says that Goodfin’s rapid trajectory is proof of the need for the concept behind it. The company has reported tenfold growth, year-on-year in its assets under management a ninefold expansion of revenue.
While it is focused on allocating clients capital through accredited investors and private placements via SPVs – it has created more than 90 so far – Fee hints at future expansion that breaks beyond its current business model.
“We definitely want to serve a broader user base through other structures as the platform scales,” she says.
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