Wealthfront is signaling to regulators that it intends to go public, according to the firm.
The company announced Monday that it had confidentially submitted a draft form S-1 to the Securities and Exchange Commission, seeking an initial public offering for its stock. The form is the initial step companies take with regulators when considering going public.
According to Wealthfront, the number of shares to be offered and the price range haven’t been determined. Any IPO would happen after the SEC finishes its review process, depending on market conditions.
Wealthfront was founded in 2008 and has become one of the industry’s premier robo advisors. It has about $85 billion in assets and works with over 1 million customers. David Fortunato is the firm’s 39-year-old CEO; he joined the company in 2009 as one of its first engineers, according to Barron’s.
Since its founding, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based firm has eschewed working with human financial advisors, contrasting with some robo advisor competitors like Betterment, with co-founder Andy Rachleff saying in 2021 that the hybrid model hadn’t worked, and that Wealthfront has been “validated in the approach that we take.”
In January 2022, UBS announced plans to acquire Wealthfront in a $1.4 billion cash deal that would have added Wealthfront’s (at the time) 400,000+ clients into the Swiss bank’s fold. However, by September of that year, the firms mutually agreed to end the merger acquisition. Instead, UBS purchased a $69.7 million note convertible into Wealthfront shares.
In 2021, Wealthfront added several funds to its customizable robo portfolios, including two cryptocurrency trusts (Greyscale’s Bitcoin and Ethereum). Advisors could select from a menu of investments, including several Dimensional Fund Advisors’ ETFs and Wealthfront’s Risk Parity Fund (which the firm announced it would shutter late last year).
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