Two former MoneyLion executives, with roots at Merrill Lynch and Barclays Wealth, are betting that fragmented data is costing advisory firms more than they realize.
Two executives who spent years building and watching wealth management firms struggle with disconnected technology have launched a startup to address what they see as a structural flaw in the industry’s data architecture.
Astraeus, which went live on August 6, 2026, is a New York-based platform designed to unify client data, advisor relationships, accounts, products, fees, and regulatory requirements into a single semantic layer. The company has raised more than $10 million from investors including Fintech Collective, F-Prime, Walkabout Ventures, and Plug and Play Ventures.
The founders are not first-time observers of the problem. Phill Rosen, co-founder and CEO, was global chief technology officer at MoneyLion, where his previous fintech company had been acquired. Jon Stevenson, co-founder and president, ran corporate development and wealth management at MoneyLion and before that held senior positions at Merrill Lynch and Barclays Wealth, as well as roles at Stifel Financial.
Between them, they bring direct experience on both the technology and business sides of wealth management; a background they say informed the decision to build infrastructure rather than another front-end application.
“The result is an industry operating on fragmented architecture that limits visibility, creates operational drag, and constrains growth,” Rosen said in announcing the launch.
What the problem actually costs
The fragmentation Rosen describes is not a new complaint. Advisory firms have long relied on a patchwork of custodial systems, CRM platforms, portfolio management tools, and compliance software that rarely communicate cleanly with one another.
Astraeus is targeting investment advisory firms, wealthtech platforms, private equity firms, and strategic consulting organizations — a broad mandate that reflects the founders’ view that the infrastructure gap runs across the industry, not just at one tier of it.
The platform uses what the company calls an ontology — a structured, machine-readable model of how entities in wealth management relate to one another — to give firms a unified view of their operations without requiring them to rip and replace existing systems. Whether that approach can scale across the varied and often bespoke tech environments at established advisory firms remains to be seen.
Credibility matters in a crowded market
The wealthtech landscape has no shortage of vendors claiming to solve data problems. What Astraeus is leaning on is the operational credibility of its founders.
Stevenson’s time at Merrill Lynch and Barclays Wealth gave him direct exposure to how large wealth management enterprises actually function — and, arguably, where they break down. Rosen’s engineering background at MoneyLion, a consumer fintech that built data infrastructure at scale, adds a technical counterweight.
That combination of distribution knowledge and engineering depth is the pitch to potential clients weighing whether a startup can solve a problem that larger, entrenched vendors have not.
The $10 million raised is enough to build and go to market but thin for a company taking on enterprise sales cycles in a sector where procurement decisions move slowly. The investors, particularly Fintech Collective and F-Prime, have wealth management and fintech portfolios that may help open doors, but commercial traction will ultimately determine whether the infrastructure thesis holds.
