Exclusive: Zocks Raises $45M Series B From Lightspeed, QED For AI Assistant To Financial Advisers

Zocks, which has built an AI assistant for financial advisers, has raised $45 million in a Series B funding co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and QED Investors, the startup told Crunchbase News exclusively.

All existing backers, including Motive Ventures and 14Peaks Capital, also participated in the financing. The raise comes less than one year after San Francisco-based Zocks raised a $13.8 million Series A. In total, Zocks has raised $65 million since its 2022 inception.

Prior to co-founding Zocks, CEO Mark Gilbert spent more than a decade at Microsoft and more than three years as vice president of product management at Twilio. While at Twilio, Gilbert oversaw compliance and was struck by the amount of information and insights that companies were able to extract from their communications.

Akos Ratku and Mark Gilbert, co-founders of Zocks.

After leaving the company, he teamed up with Akos Ratku to start Zocks, using artificial intelligence to glean information from discussions by organizing meeting notes.

“We were focused on very high security privacy areas, and that’s why we started with, and are 100% focused on, financial services,” Gilbert told Crunchbase News in an interview. “And what we found was the conversations advisers were having with clients had very, very valuable information for them.”

The industry as a whole, he said, is understaffed and deals with “a huge amount of manual work.”

The goal of Zocks is to combine the communications and AI pieces “to help accelerate and grow financial advisers and financial advisory firms.”

The raise is yet another example of the fintech sector’s rebound. Global funding to VC-backed financial technology startups totaled $51.8 billion in 2025, per Crunchbase data. That’s a fairly significant increase of 27% from 2024’s total of $40.8 billion raised.

Personalized intelligence

Zocks launched its offering in February 2024. Today, its software is used by 5,000 financial firms, including Ameritas Life Insurance, Cambridge Investment Research and Carson Group. The startup typically charges per adviser under a SaaS model, both selling directly to advisers and through enterprise contracts. It has seen 8x year-over-year growth in revenue, according to Gilbert.

Agentic AI doesn’t just help pull information from conversations with clients, Gilbert said. It also assists them with follow-up, opening accounts, filling out forms and drafting replies to emails “while still having all of the compliance and privacy that financial services needs,” he added.

For example, Zocks doesn’t create recordings of the conversations by default. But its agent listens to the conversations and builds tables of information. So if an adviser says, “tell me all my clients who have children that are coming up on college age but have no 529 plan,” the agent can do so. Or an adviser can ask in Zocks: “find me clients with old 401(k)s held outside our management.”

“Zocks will surface that list and suggest what to do next that’s personalized to each of those clients,” Gilbert said. “Then the adviser can take that action with one click.”

Proactive AI

Gilbert believes that Zocks stands out from other offerings in that it uses agents to do a variety of proactive tasks.

“There are a lot of systems out there that are called note takers and that’s very helpful for people,” he said. “The big difference for us is that we’re able to do that as well and take this information to help the advisers get more out of it. We’re trying to anticipate their needs.”

Put even more simply, the company wants to help advisers identify new financial planning opportunities across their entire client base and act faster 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 U.S. and Canada, but has plans to expand to Europe soon.

“There’s a shortage of financial advisers and that seems to be getting worse,” Gilbert said. “I think that’s one of the reasons that we’ve seen such a fast uptake.”

Investor attraction

Arif Janmohamed, partner at Lightspeed, told Crunchbase News via email that his firm was initially attracted to Zocks’ founding team.

“Mark and Akos are naturally customer-centric and they deeply understand how to build enterprise-grade products that are delightful to use, while scalable, secure and extensible,” he said. “Their product vision started with a hero-product, but rapidly expanded into platform capabilities that address the complex requirements of mid to larger enterprises while also scaling down to smaller companies and individual users.”

Laura Bock, a partner at QED Investors, said her firm was impressed by Zocks’ ability to break into the enterprise segment early, the depth of its technology, and how “seamlessly” it fits into existing workflows.

“They’ve earned the trust of several of the largest RIAs in the country and expanded successfully into adjacent verticals like insurance,” she said, “which is difficult to do without a product that truly works in regulated environments.”