The numbers come first. Marloo, an AI platform built to reduce administrative burden on financial advisers, has averaged 37% monthly revenue growth since inception, onboarded more than 900 paying advisory firms across eight countries, and raised $13 million in two rounds — $3 million pre-seed and $10 million seed — just six months apart. The company is now expanding into the United States.
The three co-founders — Hardy Michel, Shakeel Lala, and Ben Robertson — are not newcomers to regulated financial markets. Their previous ventures, Sharesies and Lightyear, introduced millions of retail investors to the market and now manage more than £7 billion in assets combined. That experience, they write in Fortune, taught them one hard lesson: they could see customers making catastrophic decisions — buying high, selling low — and had no regulatory standing to intervene.
'All we could do was send an email that said, in effect, "don't panic,"' the co-founders write. The gap between what customers needed and what a platform could legally offer became the founding thesis for Marloo.
The product does not give financial advice. It gives advisers their time back. According to the co-founders, a typical adviser managing 200 clients cannot quickly identify which of those clients is most exposed to an interest rate move — that data is not sitting in a labeled box. Marloo's AI narrows the list to a handful; the adviser makes the call.
The timing is deliberate. The co-founders argue that the investment landscape has structurally shifted: asset classes once reserved for institutional players — minimum tickets in the millions — are now packaged for ordinary investors at minimums in the thousands. That democratization is real, but it has outpaced the labels and the workflows. Advisers are being asked to construct genuinely personal portfolios for a broader client base, and personal advice takes more time per client than slotting someone into a model allocation.
Marloo's go-to-market strategy also reflects hard-won discipline. The team deliberately entered the most regulated markets first, building compliance infrastructure that now lets them enter a new country in days rather than months. Eight countries in 15 months is the result.
CEO Times take: This is what free-enterprise capital formation looks like when it is pointed at a real problem. Marloo did not wait for a regulator to design a solution; it built one, stress-tested it in the hardest jurisdictions, and let the market vote. The market voted loudly. The broader lesson is structural: when AI removes friction from high-skill professions rather than replacing the professionals, productivity compounds and more clients get served. That is not a progressive talking point about technology — it is a margin story. Advisers who adopt tools like Marloo will carry more clients, generate more revenue, and deliver better outcomes. Those who do not will be full. Capital rewards clear rules and clear value, and Marloo's growth curve suggests it has found both.
