Vancouver-basedResponsive has raised $1.1 million in a seed round led by Plug and Play Ventures, an early investor in PayPal, Dropbox, and Lending Club.
“We’re not trying to replace human workers with AI. Our mission is to provide cognitive assistance to wealth managers to help them better serve clients.”
Responsive’s platform targets banks and private managers. The funding will be used to integrate the work of Logan Grosenick, Responsive’s VP of research, who received his Ph.D. from Stanford. Grosenick research entails identifying if people are anxious or depressed based on activity in different regions of the brain, predicting aggression patterns in mice, and modelling the brain states of mice running through mazes.
“By applying insights from the brain and behavioral sciences, as well as contemporary machine learning, we can uncover complex financial portraits and life events that enable advisors to act when it matters most,” said Grosenick.
The company wants to use this research to predict behaviour and personality in people, and help wealth managers better understand clients. With its platform, Responsive said wealth managers can predict if clients are disciplined or struggle with diligent saving, or if they’re going through life transitions like marriage and having children.
Responsive has been working in stealth mode for the past year with a handful of private wealth managers in Canada. “Digital has altered client expectations. Traditional wealth managers must do more with less,” said Davyde Wachell, CEO of Responsive. “Our hybrid solution uses machine learning to upgrade advisor performance at scale.”
In a statement to BetaKit, Wachell said the company isn’t trying to build a robo-advisor, but was working to augment the services wealth managers already provide. “We’re not trying to replace human workers with AI. Our mission is to provide cognitive assistance to wealth managers to help them better serve clients.”