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Sydney-based startup Marloo, which has developed an artificial intelligence assistant to ease the administrative pressures on financial advisers, has closed a $4.2 million pre-seed funding round following strong take-up of its technology in the sector in Australia and overseas.
The capital raising was led by Blackbird Ventures, with support from CoVentures, Brand Fund and a group of notable angel investors including Xero co-founder Philip Fierlinger, Heidi Health co-founder Tom Kelly, Halter co-founder Craig Piggott, Sharesies co-founder Leighton Roberts and Stake founder Matt Leibowitz.
Marloo, which was founded in 2024 by Shakeel Lala, Hardy Michel and Ben Robertson, has already struck a chord in the financial services sector globally and the business is growing 45 per cent month on month following early adoption by wealth, planning, insurance and mortgage firms in Australia, the UK and New Zealand.
The platform has been designed to address a core challenge facing the industry where financial advice is being “buried under a mountain of low-value administrative tasks”.
Marloo says recent Australian research shows that nearly 60 per cent of the total cost of advice goes to administration and compliance, which means clients are paying "more for paperwork than actual advice".
"Our goal at Marloo is to empower advisers by building the number one product for them, loved for its design, simplicity, and ease of use,” says Lala, the CEO of Marloo.
“Advisers deserve technology that works for them, not against them. Too many are stuck with tools that lock their clients' data across different systems while other firms race ahead with better solutions.
“We are committed to building the AI assistant that the market is clearly asking for.”
The latest capital raising will be used by Marloo to drive the rollout of new features backed by customer feedback received over the past year.
“What makes (Marloo) exceptional is their product obsession: prioritising a beautiful, intuitive AI-first experience, adopting a global-first mindset, and building a product-led strategy that reminds us of the early days of Canva,” says Samantha Wong, partner at Blackbird Ventures.
“Customer and product obsession, and speed of execution are the markers of generational companies, and Marloo has this in spades."
Among the features Marloo offers the financial services sector are customised meeting templates to create client meeting notes that generate summaries in the adviser’s exact format and tone which the company says virtually eliminates post-meeting edits.
Marloo can also recall any stored information that can instantly find a critical detail from a conversation years earlier, track a client's evolving goals or generate a summary of their entire financial journey.
“It transforms the adviser’s archive into an active, instantly searchable knowledge base,” says the company.
Advisers can also securely share meeting notes with paraplanners, administrators or other advisers, ensuring the entire team operates from a “single source of truth”.
“This is enhanced by the ability to add contextual notes - whether dictated by voice, uploaded as a document, or typed - to any meeting file,” says the company.
“This creates a holistic client record, ensuring everyone on the team is working from the most complete information, all within a platform designed for the rigours and security demands of regulated financial advice.”
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