A former Palantir executive at the helm of a fast-growing tech firm is bringing the ‘DNA’ of his ex-employer into the family office and wealth management arena.
Eric Poirier, who worked at Palantir before joining Addepar, where he is now CEO, told Spear’s that his company was taking ‘the same R&D DNA that Palantir had’ and applying it ‘very deeply to the domains of wealth management, investment management [and] asset management’.
Addepar can provide its users with an overview of their holdings and positions with the banks and financial institutions with which they hold accounts. Once granted permission by users, the platform pulls data directly from the institutions, which is then displayed on its own platform.
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The firm’s system is connected to 15 million accounts across more than 600 custody banks, Poirier said. ‘Our clients can use Addepar every day to see everything they own, where they own it, how they own it, what they’re exposed to.’
Addepar has 1,400 clients across more than 60 countries, who collectively have ‘about $9 trillion on the platform’. These clients include JP Morgan, HSBC and UBS, as well as much smaller organisations including RIAs and family offices. In all, the company has 100,000 individual users and 1,300 employees, based in multiple locations around the world.
Poirier worked as a software engineer at Lehman Brothers, but left the firm in 2006 before it was engulfed by the crisis that precipitated its downfall in 2008. He then joined Palantir in a similar role, at a time when the Peter Thiel-founded startup had ‘around 15’ employees. He moved to Addepar in 2013; the company had been set up in 2009 by Thiel’s Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale.
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Poirier said he found it ‘surprising’ that ‘many family offices still today are managing their portfolios out of spreadsheets’. He added that, to some users, the insights they glean from the platform can seem like ‘magic’.
The firm’s AI assistant, Addison, is currently used by about half its client base and is supported by significant investment. Chief technology officer Bob Pisani recently told family office website Modus that Addepar was spending ‘as much as it takes’ on AI.
Speaking to Spear’s on the sideline of the FII Priority Europe summit in Rome last month, Poirier revealed that the firm’s overall annual R&D budget had increased from $100 million per year ‘a couple of years ago’ to $150 million today. He added that the firm is ‘using AI very extensively internally’ and that each dollar ‘goes a lot further than it did before because all of our engineers and designers and product managers and everyone else is just becoming that much more efficient’.
