Today we’re sharing an early milestone for Clove: we’ve raised £10m ($14m) in pre-seed funding, led by Accel with participation from Kindred, Air Street, and a group of incredible angel investors.

This is the very beginning of a much longer journey.

When Alex and I started Clove earlier this year, it came from a simple observation: financial advice doesn’t work for most people.

For all the progress in consumer technology, the way we get help and guidance around our finances has barely changed. There are products to move money, and make investments, but not to answer the questions that matter – the ones about timing, trade-offs, and planning for the future.

It doesn’t help that the financial advice industry is only able to serve those who are already wealthy.

Only 9% of people in the UK¹ receive professional financial advice. And, with half of advisers² stopping servicing less wealthy clients, the gap is only getting wider. 

This also directly impacts the wider economy. The FCA estimates that there are 7 million adults³ in the UK with £10,000+ in cash savings who may be missing out on the benefits of investing throughout their lives.

As we look more broadly, we see this isn’t a problem unique to the UK, but one that exists globally.

We believe advice should be accessible, affordable, and personal. That’s the foundation of what we’re building at Clove.

This financing gives us the space to focus on two things:

1. 1. Building toward a better way to deliver advice.
   We are exploring how to combine real human advisers with AI to break the traditional economics of the advice industry. Our aim is to make it possible to deliver high-quality, personalised advice at an unprecedented scale.
   
   As we started exploring this problem we discovered that most of what financial advisers do isn’t actually advice, it’s admin. By using AI to reduce that burden, we hope to give advisers more time to do what they are trained to do: help people make better decisions.
   
2. 2. Continue building our team.
   We’re six people today, and proud of what this group has already built. Over the next year we’ll grow carefully and deliberately, bringing in advisers, engineers, designers, and operators who want to reimagine how financial advice could work. If that sounds like you, we’d love to talk.

We are on a long-term mission to build a new kind of financial institution, and advice is just the beginning.

Follow along as we build, you can leave your email and we’ll keep you updated on our progress.