Our investment in Zocks - The AI-native system of work for wealth management
Illuminate Financial is excited to announce our investment in Zocks’ Series B round alongside Lightspeed, QED, and other top-tier investors. Here’s why we believe Zocks is poised to become the backbone of AI-native advisory firms and why now is the right moment to back their vision.
We’re in the middle of a major shift in wealth management
Clients expect more personalized service, faster responses, and a digital-first experience, while advisors are being asked to do more than ever with increasingly constrained time and capacity. The opportunity is enormous, with the US wealth market representing $67T in liquid investable assets, yet the operating model behind the industry is still heavily manual. As demand continues to rise and advisor capacity tightens, firms need a step-change in productivity to deliver high-quality advice at scale
Fragmentation isn’t just an inconvenience — it’s a tax on growth.
Across validation calls with advisors, operations leaders, and enterprise innovation teams, we consistently heard the same story: critical client context is scattered across meeting notes, CRMs, planning tools, and portfolio systems that don’t share state or intent. Advisors spend hours after every meeting re-entering the same information across systems, while firms struggle to enforce consistency, compliance, and follow-through at scale.
Zocks already saves advisors 10+ hours per week on administrative work by turning client conversations into structured data, with two-way integrations across an advisor’s entire technology stack.
Despite years of innovation in wealth tech, most solutions still operate as point tools, they capture information, but don’t move work forward. This gap between conversation and action is where Zocks stands out, creating an entirely new category in an otherwise brownfield market, with AI finally making it possible to turn client meetings into structured workflows that actually execute.
The team behind Zocks is a key reason we believe the company can win at this level
Zocks is led by a team with deep enterprise product experience and a strong track record of building mission-critical software. Co-Founder & CEO Mark Gilbert brings deep experience building and scaling compliance-sensitive, enterprise software from his time at Microsoft and Hearsay Systems, while Co-Founder and CTO Ákos Ratku brings the execution discipline required to ship secure, reliable infrastructure in a zero-error industry. Together, they’ve built Zocks with the rigor of an enterprise company and the speed of a startup, a rare combination in wealth tech.
Zocks isn’t just another AI meeting tool — it’s becoming a system of work for advisors
By owning the full flow around the client meeting, from preparation, to capture, to follow-up and system updates, Zocks sits at the highest-touch moment in the advisor-client relationship. The platform automates the meeting lifecycle end-to-end, and extends into critical workflows like onboarding, account opening, document processing, and follow-through across the advisor tech stack. Built with a privacy-first architecture and enterprise-grade controls, Zocks is designed for the realities of regulated environments from day one.
What’s been especially compelling is how quickly Zocks has moved from advisor-level adoption to becoming a trusted platform at the enterprise level. Today, more than 5,000 financial firms use Zocks, including enterprise customers such as Ameritas, Carson Group, Kestra Financial, and Osaic. Beyond saving time, Zocks is evolving into a system of insight, combining conversation data with connected platform data to surface planning opportunities across an advisor’s book of business, recommend next-best actions, and help advisors act faster with confidence.
Foundational infrastructure for the future of wealth management
We believe Zocks is building foundational infrastructure for the future of wealth management, helping firms scale personalized, proactive advice without sacrificing trust, compliance, or service quality.
As the industry shifts toward fiduciary advice, rising client expectations, and AI-native operations, the firms that win will be those that can scale high-quality service without sacrificing trust or compliance.
We’re excited to continue partnering with Mark, Ákos, and the entire Zocks team as they expand their agentic AI capabilities, deepen enterprise integrations, and define what the AI-native advisory firm looks like in the years ahead.