Lumida Wealth CEO Ram Ahluwalia on the Future of AI-Powered Wealth Management

Welcome to Inside Startup Investing, the only podcast where you can invest in every guest. On this episode, I will be speaking with the founder and CEO of Lumida Wealth, Ram Aluwalia. As a reminder, if you like what you hear on today's episode, you can invest in Lumida on Republic, regardless of whether or not you are accredited with a minimum investment of $97 until July 5, 2026. Robinhood reinvented the brokerage account.

Betterment created the robo-advisor. But Lumina Wealth is looking to combine the best of financial advisors with the best of brokerage accounts and create this super app for savvy investors to have an AI-powered wealth advisor right in their pocket. When you think about the trillions in assets managed by financial advisors, it's easy to get excited about the market opportunity. Immediately when I started talking to Ram, what stuck out to me is he is a trader at heart.

He loves investing, and he knows the ins, outs, ups, and downs of being an investor, and he wants to solve the hard problems no other solution has to date. With proprietary AI tech, Lumina aims to help investors think through buying decisions selling decisions, tax loss harvesting, capital gains management, and more. And if you want, they can even do all of the work for you, all the while taking into consideration your full financial picture with a more affordable business model to a traditional wealth advisor.

It's certainly not an easy category, competing against louder, more deep-pocketed players, as well as misguided investors and lack of education. But I give them credit. They are cutting through the noise with just about $3 million in 2025 revenues, up from just about $500K the year prior. And growth this year sounds robust too.

Lumida has proven that people want what they have to offer. Now is the time to scale. In this episode, we delve into how they plan to do so. So stay tuned to hear from the founder himself.

So for those who don't know you, give us a little bit of background about yourself, Ram, and how you came to found this firm. Sure. I'm a serial entrepreneur. I grew up in markets and investing.

I built and sold a company called Pure IQ to an A16Z-backed bank called CrossRiver. Started my career at Merrill and lived through the financial crisis, and so I saw how you can create a better opportunity using technology to transform financial services. So in one line, for those that don't know what Lumino Wealth is, What is it? We're building Robinhood for the next generation.

AI is going to transform investing. There's a large population that wants control over their investing. They don't want to pay fees to conflicted advisors that really focus on a relationship rather than investing. They want access to pre-IPO deals and they want a novel way to invest.

They want strategies that they can subscribe to. They want content that will help them make them a better and more informed investor. In terms of what that actually means, I'm a huge fan of Robinhood. I think they've done a great job in advancing forward the brokerage market, right?

That was super stodgy and didn't work for most investors. How are you taking that the next level? Yeah. So if you take a step back, about every decade, there's a new form factor in investing.

If you go back a couple of decades, you had the rise of the retail discount brokerage like Dean Witter. Then the internet came and so you had the rise of E-Trade which Morgan Stanley acquired. Then fast forward you had the rise of mobile and Robinhood was well positioned during the era of COVID where people were making trades. The issue with Robinhood is that their main customer is actually Citadel.

It's this firm on the back end that makes the market. So even though the trades are quote unquote free, Citadel is making a lot of money in the background. You can Google Robinhood and SEC enforcement actions and you'll see that there are a lot of issues where Citadel is doing well and the customer isn't. The issue with Robinhood is that what they're doing is they're selling dopamine through these buy-sell trade decisions.

It may not be in the best interest of the customer when you buy and sell and you get a confetti pup. What we're doing with Lumida is linking the dopamine to insight. So through our investing app, you'll get ideas, you get strategies, you can see the historical backtested track records, and you get novel perspectives which are geared to help the investor succeed. So in terms of doing that, you talk about leveraging AI to do some of this.

What will that look like as an investor in terms of the experience? Are you going to help me just automate my investment strategy? Yeah. In the end state, you'll have an avatar that you can interact with and communicate with.

There are tens and hundreds of thousands of financial advisors, and they need sleep, they need food, they're servicing many customers. All that's going to go away and get replaced with an AI avatar that can meet the customer on their terms. So it might be Saturday, 2 a.m.

in your pajamas where you're scratching that itch and you want to know what does NVIDIA's earnings mean for your portfolio? Or it may be that gentle reminder you want at year end to increase your contribution to your children's 529 because you're trying to mitigate tax. So that will be the future experience as an advisor via this avatar model that has a deep insight into your goals, objectives, risk tolerance, and also understands the market. So it can talk to you at your level and provide the content you need to succeed.

Where we are today is customers can use the app. They can get ideas. Those ideas are informed by our AI agents, our factor models, our analyst team. They can also look at strategies.

So strategies, for example, like Momentum, which has been a very powerful factor in the market, enable user to follow a strategy and get buy and sell recommendations. So it allows the user to have a greater sense of control. Over time we gonna let users subscribe to portfolios That would be like a compilation of strategies based on the customers risk tolerance return profile time rise and liquidity needs if you go into like let say you know a guideline for retirement right and I just use that because that's a service that I use they kind of just ask you a handful of questions you know what's your risk tolerance right what's your age and when are you looking to retire type of thing And then they're pretty much like, okay, here's four ETFs that are a little more risky because you're young and more risk forward, right?

Or, hey, here's less risky ones, you're older and more in wealth preservation mode. And that's it, and you're done. And generally, I guess that works all right. But how are you training these AI models to get more nuanced and better than something more simplistic like that?

It's a great question. So first off, the classic approach on Wall Street is to offer clients 60-40 portfolios, 60% stocks, 40% bonds. And that worked great in 1982 when interest rates were high and you're in this multi-decade trend of interest rates going lower. Fast forward to where we are today, interest rates are going higher.

And one of the best things you could do as an advisor is not recommend bonds. Add to that, you've got the rise of AI. And AI is accelerating transformation and disruption. We also have this K-shaped economy.

So people need new approaches to investing. The baby boomer approach isn't going to work. So we have a quant team. I'm a recovering quant as well.

You can look me up online at a background statistical arbitrage. So we use models to help identify stocks that are mispriced or have factors that do well over the long run. A factor might be, for example, like the momentum factor or the value factor or profitability or quality factor. So that lets investors make a better decision and they can see the historical track record, excluding transaction costs, for these strategies.

So that's the direction we're moving into. Letting people have more control, investment decision, have ideas as well. What's interesting, we also have quite a few registered investment advisors that are using our tools because they are looking for fresh ideas. Robinhood, as you already mentioned, focuses a lot on kind of the quick trade, you know, selling, buying and selling very quickly, kind of short-term investment horizons.

And I feel like when people think of AI, they automatically think of it finding mismatches in price in the short term. Like, you can make a penny on every one of these stocks in the next hour if you invested in them, right? Because it can process data so quickly. But it sounds like you actually are very much of the long-term mindset.

So what are you training these AI models to be able to identify for long-term investing? Right. So we're focused on investors. We're focused on growing wealth.

If you look at the average return of a user on Robinhood, it's not great. It's highly volatile. They're often churning and blowing the money on options. So the idea is to compound wealth.

So what you want to do when you're looking at a business is does it have earnings growth? Does it have a good valuation? Does it have a good trend? That's a type of strategy.

That would be momentum plus earnings growth strategy. There are also other strategies. For example, a dislocated high-quality asset. An example would be Google last year when the stock sold off and it got extraordinarily cheap, like 18 times forward earnings, due to the fears that AI would disrupt search.

And when we looked at the data and we used AI tools for this, we could see the cloud business was growing quickly. They were investing in TPUs. And it was one of our best-performing investments last year. Individu would be another example.

It's a high-quality business, 60% earnings growth, and today it's at 22 times earnings. So it's priced well. Micron was one of the cheapest stocks in the QQQs last year. So we have an algorithm that looks for cheap stocks in the QQQ that have good fundamentals, and that name came up.

So these are the kinds of ideas we want to present. It's easy to find ideas that everyone talks about. everyone's talking about maybe AMD, for example, but that's often late momentum. It's often too late.

When you're getting the stock tip from someone else, that is often means it's too late. You want to get involved into early momentum, into an idea that's not yet consensus, and these strategies and elements can do that. So we spend hundreds of thousands on alternative data sources, on risk factor models that are used by firms like Citadel and Millennium and Two Sigma. We integrate with SEC filings.

We're pulling down this data. We have AI agents that are reading the transcripts. You can go to our app right now, type in a ticker, and you will see the AI's view on the transcript. It will give you a bull bear case.

You'll see both sides. It's very important to have a Socratic approach. It'll give you a technical read too, and those are distinct agents. So the AI can help us make a better decision and identify opportunities that we may be ignoring.

For example, everyone's talking about AI now, but solar is doing extremely well in the wake of the Strait of Hormuz. Countries around the world have realized they need to invest in energy security. And if you're in Europe, that doesn't mean oil and gas, it means solar. So solar stocks have done well and the strategies we have on our app can help investors identify those opportunities.

You guys have made great progress in terms of getting traction, getting users and building your revenue. So talk to me a little bit about where you were at on that front. So we've been growing revenue 300% CAGR over the last several years. So it's been amazing.

wrapped up a record year. We cleared around $4 million in revenue. We have three years of audited financial statements you can see on our site and our pipeline is strong If our pipeline did not grow we would triple again this year And here the thing our pipeline is going to grow So each day we getting dozens of leads and we've been investing in technology and service and licensed advisors. That's really been our constraint on growth.

We need to invest in the team and invest in our product offering to capture that opportunity. The core persona of the users today, what do they look like? Yeah, great question. So the core persona is typically SKUs male.

They're an entrepreneur, a small business owner that could be an exited founder. They might be a GP at a VC fund. They're very sharp. They have views on the world.

They're a news junkie. They tend to live in coastal cities like New York, Miami, SF, or maybe even Austin and LA. and they believe they're smarter than their financial advisor and they probably are. And so they like the app.

They derive a lot of satisfaction from staying informed. They also like to access pre-IPO deals. That's something they can't get from Wall Street. Wall Street will sell you very expensive deals like SpaceX at $2 trillion or OpenAI.

But the real opportunities is getting early enough to make money. You know, for example, our first pre-IPO deal was CoralWeave. We offered that to our investors. Then we did Kraken, which has a substantial markup.

Citadel led that round at a $20 billion valuation, plus we got in at $12 billion. More recently, we invested in Shield AI, which is a drone defense tech company. We have a thesis that defense tech will get refactored. And that's straight up from Moos.

Conflict broke up. The shares went up 30% in the secondary market within one to two months. So that's another part of this. What does modern investing look like?

It needs to be digital. It needs to put the client first as a fiduciary. It needs to use AI tools. And it has to be more creative than 60-40.

People are looking for those opportunities for wealth creation. Pre-IPO deals can play a role in that too. They're also looking for a service like automated K1 collection. You know, I have investments in a number of different venture startups or direct lending funds.

You know, collecting my K1s is a pain in the butt. How do I see that all together in an integrated fashion? So our user thinks like that, right? They want to grow their wealth.

They're a sophisticated investor. They're looking for better tools to make better decisions. The business model, how do you make money on your investors so that it isn't the Citadel model? We charge a management fee for our core offerings today.

In the app, the app currently doesn't have a fee yet. We'll roll out a subscription-based model later, maybe end of this year, maybe next year. It'll be tiered. Think of it like Amex membership rewards.

So you'll have the green, gold, platinum, and black card based on more services. So if someone is subscribing to a strategy or portfolio, that can have a management fee. If they're simply looking for one-off ideas, that could have a lower fee. And in the app, we'll also offer access to community.

We're having more regular events in New York. These are accredited investors that we meet. We had a wonderful event in Chelsea just two days ago. Van House had about 30 people catered.

And the people are the experience. People are meeting other investors or trying to parse reality and make sense of the world. So that could be another access point too. In the age of AI and social media where people are spending more time living digital lives than ever, the need for community also matters more than ever.

And we believe this also helps to create a moat. It's another reason why crowdfunding matters. If we can grow our business through a referral organically through a highly motivated user base of investors, I think we'll do well. I think so, too.

You talk about the management fee. So do you almost look at this as kind of these AI agents are actively managing your money? And in that world, it only makes sense to pay a management fee if your money is actively invested. And, you know, you go into Robinhood or Charles Schwab or any of your accounts and you could have, you know, tens of thousands in cash while you're looking for the next opportunity.

And then you start putting it to work as you kind of make your own decisions. But are you almost saying that this is automatically being invested based on your profile and then it just kind of goes to work for you so that it's automatically invested? It'll take time to get there. We're not there yet.

Right now we have ideas and we have strategies. The next step is how do you combine these into portfolios that people can subscribe to? So for someone that wants an end-to-end experience, and they might want that human touch as well for financial planning, for trust, tax, and estate planning, and we call it providing a wealth architect service, they may still need that human touch up until the AI avatar technology gets to a place where the whole thing is digital. So that management fee model makes sense then.

But for others that are just looking for ideas, it's going to be more of a subscription-based model. When you think about growth strategy, love hearing that you want to leverage community and referrals. How else do you think about continuing to grow the business going forward? Social media.

We've grown a community of 60,000 people. 50,000 of those people are on Twitter. They follow us. We grew this organically since inception from content where it's commentary in the markets, sharing health and wellness tips and other content area that our target audience values.

And we've been growing on TikTok, on Instagram. And that's another reason why I do the crowdfunding because we can help accelerate and brute strap growing community on these new channels. So it's social media. Look at the success of Elon and Tesla.

He grew Tesla without any advertising on TV. He did not sponsor a stadium. It was through social media and referral and building a fan base And it was so successful he decided to buy Twitter And you could tell a similar story for what Robinhood did Users became owners, owners became users. It's what Chris Dixon at Andreessen Horowitz refers to as read, write, own.

You saw the same phenomenon with Coinbase and also with SoFi. These companies achieved very high valuations. These are $40 billion, $50 billion, $60 billion companies, still relatively young, and they achieved that by building community. Community became the moat, and it also became a growth engine.

I would argue there's a lot of stickiness in brokerage products, often because it's a lot of work to move your money over, right? And you kind of get somewhere, you establish everything, then to move it all over is a pain. So there is that friction point. How are you working through that friction to drive adoption?

Yeah, well, first off, you're right on. So the average age of an advised relationship is about 14 years. So first off, this is a fantastic business model. Wealth management is one of the best business models out there.

There's a reason why the stock prices of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are hitting all-time highs. I grew up in this industry. it's a fantastic business model and the VCs haven't figured out that this is the business model worth disrupting. That's one.

Second is there isn't a deep bench of next-gen advisors. Most advisors are aging out. They're 60 to 70 plus year olds. They're servicing the boomer generation and that next-gen, they don't want the ticket to the US Open or the awkward dinner with their banker once a year.

They would rather hang out with their friends and buy their parents a ticket to the U.S. Open. So that's what we're focused on.

We're focused on that next gen, and the next gen wants more. They realize they don't have the time, focus, and expertise, but they do care about investing well. They do care about mitigating taxes. They do care about how to integrate that in an overall kind of wealth architect model.

They do care about community and being alongside like-minded people. So we've been able to grow with very limited marketing. We've done like de minimis marketing. It's my Twitter feed primarily.

We have a newsletter with several thousand readers. It's an incredible audience on that newsletter list of exited founders. We have people from Sequoia reading the newsletter, for example. Very high quality base.

And we've been able to grow the app. And we're not even trying to grow the app yet. We want to make the app a delight. We want people to love it.

We want repeat engagement, repeat usage. We're tracking what features are they using. And when we feel that it's ready for prime time, then we'll turn the spigot and go into growth marketing. We're not there yet.

We want to make a wonderful product that people are obsessed about using every day. And we're well on our way. The repeat engagement rates on a daily and weekly basis for our app are very high. and we're just getting started.

We have so much we want to do on the app. I mentioned ideas, strategies. We have a live news feed. It's like a Bloomberg terminal in your pocket.

People pay $25,000 for a Bloomberg terminal. You can get that in your pocket. You can have an AI native watch list. How many times do you add a stock to your watch list because you think it's a good idea but maybe it's overpriced?

Three months go by and it's shot up and it's too late. The AI will hover on the stock and say, hey, Chris, now might be a good time to buy it. Take action now. You get that timely notification.

Or, hey, Chris, that stock you bought, Broadcom's dropped 20% after earnings. Why don't you get the tax loss harvest and rotate to NVIDIA? And our factor model can identify those opportunities. So what I've described isn't in these investing apps.

Today, I maintain it is the best investing app in the market. And we're still getting started. We still have a lot to do. We haven't enabled trading yet, right?

But it is already today, from an insight perspective, I maintain it's the best investing app in the market. I challenge anyone to find better. For an investor who's listening in, they're on the line, but they're not there yet. What do you want them to know?

They should know that I'm a competitor. I'm here to win. This is my focus. I have an unhealthy obsession with winning.

I'm a serial entrepreneur. I built and sold a startup. You can Google me in the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg or American Banker or Market Watch. Leadership matters.

Having been there and done it before matters. Being able to assemble a world-class team matters. Being able to formulate a vision and develop the technology and execute matters. Vision is cheap.

Execution is everything. I would say look at what we accomplished with one round of financing. It's extraordinary. We did $2.

5 million a couple years ago. Look at who the investors are. We have former SEC chairman Arthur Levitt, who was also an investor in my last company. We have, I'm pleased to share, Kenny Pasternak, the founder of Knight Trading, is coming in on this round.

The founder of Knight Trading, who transformed Wall Street with automated market making, is an investor. And you go to our page, you're going to see we have the seed round investor in Circle. we have early investors in SoFi and Coinbase. And what they see in Lumida is the same opportunity and reason they invested in those other companies.

They see the promise and potential of a highly disruptive category killer in Lumida. So we're here to win. I'd invite you to get on board. It's an exciting time.

If you like what you heard on the show today, you can invest $97 or more in Lumina Wealth on Republic until July 5th, 2026. And of course, if you want to learn more about why this company scored a 4.4 out of 5 on the Kingscrow Proprietary Rating Scale, you can go to kingscrow.com and search Lumina Wealth.

Be sure to give us a like and a comment wherever you listen so we make sure more great investors like you can find us. Happy investing.