Aaron Klein, the former CEO and co-founder of Nitrogen, has returned to the wealthtech space with the launch of Contio, an operating system for meetings.
Klein raised $5.5 million to get operations off the ground via his own capital as well as investors, including Orion founder and former CEO Eric Clarke, Redtail founder Brian McLaughlin, AdvicePeriod founder and Principal Steve Lockshin, Allworth Founding Principal and Vice Chair Scott Hanson, Edelman founder Ric Edelman, former wealth management executive Barnaby Grist, Pontera CEO Yoav Zurel, Riskalyze co-founder Mike McDaniel, Former Chairman of the Board at Riskalyze Andy Swan and Capital Eleven Ventures.
Contio is currently in beta and will launch fully in the fall with three verticals. In addition to financial advisors, the meeting OS will also be marketed to talent recruiters and software engineers. Edelman, Lockshin, Clarke and McLaughlin have also joined an advisory council for the meeting OS for advisors.
Klein previously co-founded Nitrogen in 2011 and stepped down from his role as CEO in November 2023.
Klein said the idea for Contio was born about seven years ago, when he was still running Riskalyze and spending some 70% of his time in meetings—a process he found to be quite inefficient.
“I went back and looked at my old calendars, and it added up to over 37,000 meetings over the course of 12 1/2 years,” he said. “There just has to be a better way than your agenda being over here and your notes being over there and your documents being spread around everywhere.”
Since then, we’ve seen the rise of AI meeting note takers, including several specifically designed for the financial advisor market.
“I just think that those products really kind of have it all wrong,” Klein said. “They do nothing to actually improve the meeting. They just record the misery, and then they send us emails about it. To me, what’s really, really meaningful is, how do you actually help people become elite meeting strategists? How do you help them get way better at running snappier meetings, smarter meetings and more action-packed meetings? Because then, the notes that come out of that are actually much more actionable and useful.”
Klein said his technology goes beyond the existing tools, focusing on the preparation involved before a meeting.
“We’re really starting at the end front-end of the problem, thinking about how to shape the meeting, plan the meeting, use AI to give people their game plan for the meeting,” Klein said.
That preparation is a lot of work; it can take three times the amount of time you have scheduled for the meeting.
“We’re building AI that’s going to do 95% of that work for you, so that we can kill broken meetings entirely off your calendar,” he said.
Klein has built a team of 10 people, including AI engineers and data science experts, all in Boise, Idaho.
The meeting OS will snap into an advisor’s calendar and work with video call platforms Zoom, Google Meet and Teams. It also works for in-person meetings. In addition to using the system externally with clients and prospects, advisory firms can also use it for internal meetings with team members.
“That’s where a lot of the intelligence that can feed into those external meetings can come from,” Klein said.
Contio will integrate broadly with an advisor’s tech stack. It will focus initially on integrating with risk/analytics, financial planning, performance reporting and CRM systems.
They’ve also built a secure AI architecture that doesn’t ship data out to third-party AI services.
“We keep all the data for our clients in our secure cloud environment, and there’s really not the risk that a lot of these other applications pose where they ship data across the wire to third party AI services on their APIs,” Klein said.
Contio does leverage many of the artificial intelligence models available, such as the Llama models from Meta, the DeepSeek 1776 model, and different open-source models for specific jobs, like speech-to-text and summarization.
Klein said the company hasn’t yet finalized the pricing for the technology.
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