Samir Vasavada co-founded Vise, a New York company whose platform helps financial advisers build and manage personalized portfolios, and is its chief executive. He started it as a teenager with a friend he met at age 12.
Two Kids and a Shared Obsession
He met Runik Mehrotra at college summer classes when both were 12. They bonded over technology and started building small projects together. One of their first apps was a simple game, nothing groundbreaking, but it was their first taste of making something from scratch, and they were hooked.
As teenagers they began advising financial institutions on how artificial intelligence worked, which drew them toward investment management. Their first plan was to sell AI tools to the largest banks.
Advice From Jamie Dimon
That plan changed at a Detroit startup event where Jamie Dimon was speaking. Mehrotra had gone with a school field trip, and the pair caught the JPMorgan chief as he left the stage to ask whether his bank wanted AI to automate advisers’ investment work. Dimon told them no, but suggested they look at independent advisers, who were leaving big firms and would need technology to replace what they left behind.
They took the advice. Vasavada left high school partway through eleventh grade and moved to the Tenderloin in San Francisco to build the company. He later said he did not give his parents much choice; it felt more like a calling than a passion, and the bigger risk was not trying.
Building for Advisers
Vise launched in 2016 to give advisers AI-driven portfolio construction they could personalize for each client, and investors followed. Ribbit Capital led a $65 million round in 2021 that valued the company at about $1 billion.
Today the platform reports more than $152 billion in assets and 245,000 accounts, with direct indexing, fixed income, and tax-aware transitions. The independent advisers Dimon pointed them toward are now its core customers, and Vasavada still runs the company he left high school to build.
