Baltimore-based personal finance startup Facet Wealth raises $33M

Facet Wealth, a Baltimore-based personal financial planning startup, raised $33 million as it looks to scale, according to CEO Anders Jones.
The Series A round was led by New York private equity firm Warburg Pincus, and included participation from existing investor Slow Ventures.
Launched in 2016, Facet Wealth is looking to provide financial planning services and advice to people who have in the range of $100,000 to $1 million. The aim is to go beyond asset management to goal-based planning, Jones said, such as saving for college or retirement.
Through a subscription, each client has access to a human advisor employed by Facet Wealth who is a certified financial planner. In turn, the company’s tech platform is designed to make the process more efficient. It employs a simple user experience, and a system that helps advisors make decisions while working with the client so they can cut down on prep time.
In combining human and tech elements, Jones said the company is aiming to be more affordable than a financial services firm, and provide deeper advice than a platform could offer. On average, clients pay about $1,600 per year, with the price tied directly to the level of service a client is getting.
Along with services being more costly, the clients in that range often aren’t as profitable for larger financial services companies. The startup partners with those larger firms to transition those clients directly to its service. So far, it’s struck about 15 such partnerships.
With the funding, Facet Wealth is planning to grow more partnerships, and continue to build out the tech platform.
Jones, Patrick McKenna and Brent Weiss are cofounders of the company. Jones said he spent about 12 years in Silicon Valley, where he was with data onboarding company LiveRamp, which was acquired by Acxiom in 2015. When looking to launch a new company, he looked to relocate.
“We wanted to start a company in a meaningful industry that had an opportunity to grow in a large, impactful company,” Jones said. But they wanted to do it outside of Silicon Valley, so they looked at a bunch of different cities. With the combination of financial services anchors in firms like T. Rowe Price and Legg Mason and tech talent from the area’s universities, “Baltimore really rose to the top of the list as one the best places to do it,” Jones said.
They started out with a couple of desks at Johns Hopkins’ FastForward incubator, and the company has since grown to 27 employees in Harbor East’s Bagby Furniture Company Building. Following the funding, Jones said they plan to grow to 40-50 employees by the end of the year.
“We’re very committed to staying as a Baltimore company,” Jones said.