Amal Jolly: Founder and CEO at Saturn on raising a $15m Series A in just 10 days

0:00Amal Jolly:All right. Hello and welcome back to the Scaling Europe show. I've got Amal here. This is a super interesting, hot off the press story. You've just raised a big round, Amal. Can you give us the story, the details, the introduction? First of all, thank you so much for inviting me. I'm a co-founder of Saturn. What we do is we are building the operating system for wealth management and financial advice. One of the biggest problems is the infrastructure that financial advice is currently built on is the biggest bottleneck to the desire for more people to receive advice. And what we are doing is fixing exactly that, enabling advisors and advice firms to scale to a lot more people.

0:43Amal Jolly:Amazing. And how are you doing that? What have you built that's kind of enabled that? Yeah. So what we are building is through AI and good tech, rebuilding the infrastructure at which financial advice and wealth management is currently built. 70 % of the time of advisors is currently spent on compliance and admin. Compliance, although very important, is the biggest bottleneck in the UK. And they spend three times as much as a US advisor. And what Saturn enables them to do is automate in higher standards all of these compliance issues, but also enable them to do all the workflows that enable them to deliver the wealth management service that they want to do.

1:26Amal Jolly:Amazing. And you've got some super exciting news to announce. Can you touch on the round you've raised? How much and who from? Super excited to announce that we have raised$15 million from Stingler, a European fund, and followed by Shapers and a couple of other VCs that have dedicated their time to actually understand wealth management and the problem space that is. We are super excited to actually partner with them to actually go and solve the problem that exists in the industry now. Amazing. And what was it that enabled you to raise the money that you raised? the reason that we were able to raise quite quickly in about 10 days or so and find the right partner is because we were super convinced that there are only a few people who really understand the problem space and also very few people who we were able to really connect on a human level and this connection just allowed us to raise quite quickly at the same time we are the leading provider in the UK we were able to scale to over 600 firms in a matter of 15 months and we were also able to show a lot more of impact to those advice firms that we currently work with how many firms did you see 100 or 200 we currently work with over 600 firms in the UK 600 that's that's phenomenal I mean you know how are you able to kind of scale and on board so quickly?

3:01It's a challenge for sure, but the way we have done it is by maintaining high standards of what the onboarding experience is. The way we are focused is by having an amazing team on our side that allows to partner with them, understand the change and implementation that needs to be done in a firm while you're rebuilding a lot of the infrastructure. and the short answer is the team that we have built is amazing and they're fit to deliver the satin experience that we call inside to a lot more firms and what we are excited about is with this fresh capital we are able to scale that gold and diamond instead of a shit process that others

3:45Amal Jolly:are used to amazing and you know you've raised a lot of money you've talked about having that fresh capital injected to the business what's going to be your first priority and in doing or spending that money with yeah the first priority for us is we have built an amazing culture of execution execution machine with hearts the hearts is the culture that we have at satin for us is to go back and understand what are the parts that we do need to now spend money on to scale so from a end customer experience how do we scale the best experience right now without actually having a lot of bad process in between that slows down the organization?

4:24What are the right processes to now add to ensure standards around data, around security, around end quality is maintained? So that's number one. Second, we are going to invest a lot more into people, the right people to join Saturn and this mission to actually change financial advice. The third thing is to build a lot more awareness about wealth management and financial advice and how this problem can be solved in the next five to six years and unlock a whole new wave of experience that the end customers are not used to. They're used to apps on their phone. How does it look like if more humans can connect to more humans?

5:06Very similar to how medical advice reaches to 4 billion people. How would it look like if a billion people can access financial advice?

5:14Amal Jolly:you know it's it's an amazing mission you know when you say it when you put it in those numbers to kind of give and bring financial advice to a billion people it's yeah it's an inspiring mission what brought you to this mission i guess you know people i often meet founders and entrepreneurs who i often think wow you could have built anything in any business in you know people who want to build and disrupt and build really meaningful things i feel i can often do that in any industry what was it about this space of like providing financial advice that really drew you in This space is pretty phenomenal.

5:49It's a profession. If you look at financial advice, for example, it's a profession under wealth management. And wealth management is pretty known to a lot more people. The 1 % wealthy in the world can access it. And financial advice is this subset which tries to help people who are families who are trying to retire. People are trying to buy the second home or the third home or the first home even, trying to navigate the complex tax issues that they might have. All of this to the retail customer. And when we looked into this industry, I fell into this industry when I moved from India to the UK, where I was able to work with advisors who actually provide a lot of impact in providing clarity to a lot of money decisions.

6:39and we always wondered how can we actually scale this to a lot more people and the biggest bottleneck has been the compliance burden and the admin burden that they have to even sell one client it costs them about two thousand pounds a year and on their current economics model it kind of doesn't work in order to serve more people the advice gap that exists in the uk itself there's about 8 million people would love to pay for an advisor, but can't access it because of visibility and the cost to serve. And what we really wanted to serve was these advisors enable them to scale a lot more.

7:18Amal Jolly:And I imagine that to that 2000 pound cost will ultimately be passed on to the end users, the consumers themselves, right? So by reducing that cost, you're both opening up access, but also ideally saving those end users money as well? Absolutely. The goal of Saturn is to actually work really with the advisors to reduce the cost to up to 90 % and then ensure all these savings are passed on to the end consumers. What that would look like is existing customers receive a world-class service, what family offices can give to families. Now more people can access it. And then also people who can't currently access advice around retirement, pensions, and a lot of these hard financial divisions, what we are going to enable advisors to do is reach out to a lot more of these people.

8:10What we want is advice to be a true profession that can be scaled.

8:15Amal Jolly:Amazing. Yeah. So your proposition or your sell to a lot of these wealth managers is actually we're going to, it's not so much about the money saving. it's like we're going to grow the market for you, right? We're going to enable you to partner up with so many more people and to access so many more individuals who wouldn't have been able to access it before. Absolutely. I think this is much needed in this particular space. The safety layer of financial advice is something humans need. It's a right. And we are super excited every day to actually partner with advisors to deliver this. Amazing. And I want to talk a bit about the fundraiser itself.

8:51Amal Jolly:You said you closed the round in nine days. 10 days? Yeah, we started the fundraise. We got a term sheet and signed in about 9 to 10 days. And it's always been about getting to the right partner. And we ended up being lucky to get Singular European VC fund and shapers started by Phil and Thomas, ex-head of Sophia, to partner with them to actually make a big impact in this space. And what was it that brought somebody like Singular on board? What did they see in the business that made them think, OK, we've got to get in here? We saw a lot of things on Singular. And I think that's the exact same things they saw in us as well.

9:34We call the reason behind name Saturn is because it rains diamonds on Saturn. And we saw that on a fun fact and also goddess of wealth. but the reason behind diamonds is because diamonds are quite unique, uncut gems and raw. And in a similar fashion, when Singler came in and saw each individual as Saturn, they were extremely unique, extremely raw, extremely moderated. And there are people who are 45 and been in the space for a long time to people who've been just a graduate, people who dropped out at 18 who joined Saturn to actually just dedicate their life on this mission. And I think Singular saw that.

10:18In a similar fashion, we saw that in Singular and Shapers. We saw people who are really unique, creative people, people who are really numbers focused. And I think that combination of people is what made us partner.

10:32Amal Jolly:How did you, I guess, what did you do before you kicked off the process to get you ready for such a short, tight sprint so that you could get that timesheet signed, delivered in 10 days? So we started the process in the start of July and I know it's not the right time for a lot of founders to start it during the summer holidays. But what we did was a week before that, we just got a lot of data room ready and then a lot of the process ready. A lot of people already knew what Saturn was working on and knew the impact that this industry is going to have, the change that this industry is going to have over the next two to three years.

11:12And we just reached out to them. A couple of people reached out to us and we just started the process and completed it.

11:18Amal Jolly:Amazing. And, you know, you've been on this amazing journey. You've got 600 clients. You signed an amazing VC in a super short space of time. You've built what looks like a world-class team. I want to know, like, what has gone wrong or, like, what mistake have you made in building Saturn where you think god if we hadn't have done that we'd be even further ahead is there anything that anything like that that you can share gosh there's a there's a lot and that's the privilege to actually work on a startup you get to get to be in a higher clock speed of a lot of mistakes with low risk initially and then over time you get to learn and have better judgment and although these words might mean nothing what i mean is like there are some mistakes that we made for example

12:04we thought the users were always the advisors and then we spent a bunch of time with them and then there are these hidden users that we ended up finding which are these compliance people who we are trying to scale these admin staff who we are trying to scale and working with them initially has been an immense pleasure and understood the value of Saturn as a whole comes from this compliance first AI where we can take away the complexity away. And what we did from there was double down on those learnings. We brought in these compliance people. Compliance people now work at Saturn, build the products with us.

12:43We acquired a 20-year-old compliance company, something that a lot of seed companies don't do. And we took these immense bets initially. Another mistake I think we learned and adapted quite quickly is internally how important onboarding is to not just to a client but internally to a member who's joining a team we scale from a team of like 14 to now about 43 in a matter of four months and onboarding is something that's super super super important and these are some two lessons that comes to my head when I think about it that's so interesting

13:27Amal Jolly:The first one, you almost, yeah, like bringing your end users almost in-house is such an interesting approach and model, right? And it's so interesting that you didn't, I guess you wouldn't have known that those people were using your product until you sort of really get into the weeds and really understand your users and your customers. Really interesting. It feels like you've got, yeah, a huge amount of momentum and things are going in the right direction. what needs to happen for you to raise your next big chunk of money for you to get to that next stage i think what we are focused uh on is not that at the moment what we are focused on is uh i believe the biggest thing is the culture and ensuring where to invest right to scale that part of the culture that got us to this point um definitely what got us to this point is not what's going to be in the future.

14:21So for us is once the culture is ready to scale, which is going to be in the next couple of days or so, we've been working really hard to ensure where do we need to invest this money into? And once we do that, we'll have some immense numbers that we're going to hit by the end of this year, early next year. And once the model is working, we're going to scale this across multiple regions, multiple level of problems that exist in this infrastructure layer of wealth management.

14:48Amal Jolly:interesting and you talk about multiple regions have you got regions in mind and are there sort of like local complexities and dealing with like a compliance heavy product like this yeah absolutely even though we are very compliance heavy product we are a wealth management infrastructure product um we are very compliance heavy because of the region that we are in the uk has one of the most scariest but also at the same time uh uh the the the like the amount of compliance and ambiguity each regulation comes in because of a principles-based regulator is crazy. So what we want to do is try and test it out here and scale it to a level where we have an immense amount of impact.

15:30And once we do this, a natural expansion for us is other commonwealth developed countries like Australia, Singapore, South Africa, and other areas that we are deeply looking at where an impact of compliance can actually also have on the delivery of the

15:48Amal Jolly:end service interesting yeah yeah no and it's almost like doing it in the uk first it's almost like doing it in hard mode once you've done it in the uk and you've nailed the the product and the proposition in the most compliant heavy market it should theoretically only get easier absolutely that's our bet at the moment but at the same time it's closer to heart uh europe and And the UK is very close to heart. And for us, delivering an amazing service here is the most important thing. Amazing. Well, look, we're out of time, but thank you so much for joining me. It's an amazing fundraiser from a great VC.

16:21Amal Jolly:So congratulations. Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here. Thank you. Speak soon.