Exclusive: Sava raises $10M to cut the paperwork behind trusts
Illustration: Tiffany Herring/Axios
Sava, an AI-enabled trust administration company, has raised $10 million in seed funding, CEO Nimit Maru tells Axios Pro exclusively.
Why it matters: Trust administration still relies on manual coordination among attorneys, advisors and trust officers.
Zoom in: Gradient Ventures led, joined by Y Combinator, SV Angel, Orange Collective and SurgePoint Capital.
- Other investors include Instacart co-founder Max Mullen, Gusto co-founder Tomer London and Eleonora Sharef, a former McKinsey partner.
How it works: Sava Trust Company handles ongoing trust reporting, compliance and distributions, while families' attorneys draft the trust documents and their financial advisors manage the investments.
- The company says its software extracts information from documents, runs compliance checks and synchronizes records with custodians.
- Human trust officers review and approve the work and retain responsibility for fiduciary decisions.
State of play: Sava gets referrals through estate attorneys and financial advisors, Sadiwala says.
- The company charges a flat annual fee based on each trust's complexity.
- COO Rush Sadiwala says reducing administrative work should let Sava serve smaller trusts that are uneconomical for some traditional providers.
Context: Maru encountered the industry's manual processes while working on his own estate plans after selling previous companies, including coding school Fullstack Academy.
- "People would send me printouts of spreadsheets, and I was like, can I just have the spreadsheet?" he says.
- The founders initially considered selling software to trust companies before deciding to operate one themselves, Sadiwala says.
What's next: Sava is developing APIs that would let financial firms access trust information and submit distribution requests through their existing software.
