Zockswhich built an AI assistant for financial advisors, raised $45 million in Series B funding co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners And QED Investorsthe startup told Crunchbase News exclusively.
All existing donors, including Driving companies And 14Pics Capitalalso participated in the financing. The raise comes less than a year after San Francisco-based Zocks raised a $13.8 million Series A round. In total, Zocks has raised $65 million since its inception in 2022.
Before co-founding Zocks, CEO Marc Gilbert spent more than a decade Microsoft and over three years as Vice President of Product Management at Twilio. At Twilio, Gilbert oversaw compliance and was struck by the amount of information and insights companies were able to extract from their communications.
After leaving the company, he teamed up with Akos Ratku to launch Zocks, using artificial intelligence to glean insights from discussions by organizing meeting notes.
“We were focused on very high security privacy areas, and that’s why we started and are 100% focused on financial services,” Gilbert told Crunchbase News in an interview. “And what we found was that the conversations that advisors were having with clients contained very, very valuable information for them.”
The industry as a whole, he said, is understaffed and does “a huge amount of manual labor.”
Zocks’ goal is to combine elements of communications and AI “to help accelerate and grow financial advisors and financial advisory firms.”
The increase is yet another example of the rebound of the fintech sector. Global funding for venture-backed fintech startups totaled $51.8 billion in 2025, according to Crunchbase data. This represents a fairly significant increase of 27% from the total of $40.8 billion raised in 2024.
Personalized intelligence
Zocks launched its offering in February 2024. Today, its software is used by 5,000 financial companies, including Ameritas Life Insurance, Cambridge Investment Research And Carson Group. The startup typically charges per advisor in a SaaS model, selling both directly to advisors and through enterprise contracts. According to Gilbert, its turnover increased eightfold from one year to the next.
Agentic AI doesn’t just help extract insights from customer conversations, Gilbert said. It also helps them track, open accounts, fill out forms and write responses to emails “all while having all the compliance and privacy that financial services need,” he added.
For example, Zocks does not create recordings of conversations by default. But his agent listens to the conversations and builds tables of information. So if an advisor says, “Tell me all my clients who have college-aged children but don’t have a 529 plan,” the agent can do that. Or an advisor can ask in Zocks: “find me clients with old 401(k)s held outside of our management.”
“Zocks will bring up that list and suggest what to do next based on each of those clients,” Gilbert said. “The advisor can then take this action with just one click. »
Proactive AI
Gilbert believes Zocks stands out from other offerings in that it uses agents to perform a variety of proactive tasks.
“There are a lot of systems called note takers and it’s very useful for people,” he said. “The big difference for us is that we’re able to do that as well and use that information to help advisors get the most out of it. We try to anticipate their needs.”
In even simpler terms, the company wants to help advisors identify new financial planning opportunities for their entire client base and act more quickly by suggesting what to do next based on the data Zocks gets from all the systems it’s integrated with.
Currently, Zocks operates primarily in the United States and Canada, but plans to expand to Europe soon.
“There is a shortage of financial advisors and it seems to be getting worse,” Gilbert said. “I think that’s one of the reasons we’ve seen such rapid adoption.”
Investor attraction
Arif Janmohamedpartner at Lightspeed, told Crunchbase News via email that his company was initially attracted to the Zocks founding team.
“Mark and Akos are naturally customer-centric and have a deep understanding of how to create enterprise products that are delightful to use, while still being scalable, secure and extensible,” he said. “Their product vision began with a flagship product, but quickly expanded to platform capabilities that meet the complex requirements of medium and large businesses, while also accommodating small businesses and individual users.”
Laura Bockpartner at QED Investors, said his firm had been impressed by Zocks’ ability to quickly penetrate the enterprise segment, the depth of its technology and how it “seamlessly” integrated into existing workflows.
“They have earned the trust of many of the largest RIAs in the country and have successfully expanded into adjacent verticals like insurance,” she said, “which is difficult to do without a product that actually works in regulated environments.” »
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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