Blackbird is doubling down: it led both the pre-seed and now the seed, and now holds 34% of the company. Icehouse Ventures also participated. The founders -Hardy Michel, Shakeel Lala, and Ben Robertson, retain ~27% each. US expansion is next.
Marloo, the London-based AI company for financial advisers, has raised $10 million in a seed round led by Blackbird Ventures, with participation from Icehouse Ventures.
The round brings total funding to $12.7 million in under twelve months, Blackbird also led the $2.7 million pre-seed in September 2025. Blackbird now holds approximately 34% of Marloo after both rounds.
Co-founders Hardy Michel and Shakeel Lala each retain roughly 27% of the company. The new capital will go towards strengthening Marloo’s position in the UK and Australia, expanding into the United States, and developing a broader product suite aimed at becoming the core operating system for financial advisory firms.
Marloo was founded in 2024 by Hardy Michel, Shakeel Lala, and Ben Robertson. A third of the team are former financial advisers. The company’s starting point was a familiar and intractable problem: financial advice is one of the most heavily regulated, document-intensive professions in financial services, and the typical adviser spends a disproportionate share of their working time on administration, meeting notes, compliance documentation, file notes, client correspondence, and regulatory reporting, rather than on the advice itself.
The founders interviewed approximately 800 potential customers before building anything, establishing the specific pain points that would drive adoption.
Marloo now generates advice documents, compliance workflows, and client context files, and maintains a persistent knowledge base of each adviser’s client relationships that carries across every conversation.
The ambition, articulated by Blackbird general partner Samantha Wong, is something closer to what Canva became for design: a platform that did not replace designers but made design work accessible, faster, and more professional for a much wider group of practitioners.
“It reminds us of the early days of Canva,” Wong told both the September pre-seed announcement and this week’s round, a consistency that suggests the comparison is anchored in conviction rather than pitch rhetoric.
The traction metrics reported by Marloo are striking for a company that did not exist a year ago. More than 650 advisory firms across six countries are paying customers. Revenue has grown more than 40% month on month for eleven consecutive months.
Customer churn is described as close to zero, a metric that, in enterprise SaaS, is a stronger signal of product-market fit than any growth rate. Individual user testimonials in the announcement include a 90% client close rate, a fourfold increase in work rate, seven to ten hours saved per week, and advice documents that previously took eight hours now take less than four.
These are company-curated testimonials rather than audited metrics, but the volume and specificity of the claims is consistent with a product that has become genuinely embedded in daily workflows rather than a tool that is purchased and unused.
Shakeel Lala addressed directly the competitive risk that most observers raise first: will the large AI labs, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, build tools that displace vertical AI companies serving specific professions?
His answer is that the risk is overestimated in this particular domain. “An AI tool like Claude can summarise a meeting, but it can’t triangulate the layers of context required to get a usable output that meets legal and regulatory requirements, a firm’s rules and adviser preferences,” he said.
“AI outputs are inherently non-deterministic, and advice is a trust and proof-based deterministic profession.”
That framing, the fundamental tension between probabilistic AI output and the compliance requirements of regulated financial advice, is the strongest version of the vertical AI moat argument: not that the technology is proprietary, but that the compliance and institutional context required to make it usable is hard to replicate without deep domain expertise.
The US expansion is the strategic test. Marloo’s strongest markets to date are the UK and Australia, both relatively concentrated, compliance-heavy financial advice markets where regulatory frameworks are well-defined and professional bodies have established documentation standards.
The US market is larger, more fragmented, and regulated across a patchwork of federal and state frameworks. Building compliance-ready AI documentation tools for the US adviser market requires rebuilding the institutional knowledge that Marloo has accumulated in its existing markets, with a founding team that has direct experience in the UK and Australian profession but will be operating in a new regulatory environment.
The $10 million seed is sufficient to get the US expansion started; whether it is sufficient to establish a meaningful market position will depend on how quickly the company can replicate its UK and Australian adoption dynamics in North America.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
