With Y Combinator, Goodwater Capital, and executives from Stripe and OpenAI also participating, the SEC-registered platform uses AI to deliver personalized investment guidance to the millions of Americans who can’t access traditional financial advice.
Astor, an AI-native investment advisory platform registered with the SEC, today announced a $5 million seed round led by Monashees, with participation from Y Combinator, Goodwater Capital, Gilgamesh Ventures, 468 Capital, Valutia, Sunshine Lake and executives from Stripe and OpenAI. Since launch, the platform has attracted thousands of users and more than $200 million in connected accounts. The funding will be used to grow Astor’s product, engineering, and growth teams, and expand its service lines.
Investing Has Become a Spectator Sport
More Americans are investing than ever before. But for many, investing has started to look a lot like gambling. Meme stocks, crypto speculation, and prediction markets have turned financial markets into a form of entertainment. According to FINRA, 61% of investors under 35 now rely on social media for investment decisions.
Meanwhile, the people and institutions designed to help — financial advisors — remain out of reach for most. Traditional advisors typically require $500,000 or more in assets just to take you on as a client. Only about 35% of Americans work with one, and among adults under 30, that figure drops below 5%.
A Problem the Founders Lived
Co-founders Bruno Koba and Daniel Tulha grew up in Brazil, where it’s standard practice to be paired with a financial advisor the moment you open a brokerage account, regardless of how much money you have. When they moved to the United States, they found the opposite: most people are investing entirely on their own.
“We looked around and everyone we knew was investing on their own, with many treating their brokerage accounts like a casino,” said Koba, co-founder and CEO of Astor. “Back home, even the most basic advisor gives you the sense that someone is paying attention to your money. Here, unless you’re wealthy, nobody is.”
Koba previously worked as a fintech investor at Monashees and as a data scientist at Nubank, where he built machine learning models to scale credit to millions of Brazilians. Tulha was a software engineer at Stripe and Robinhood, building financial infrastructure at global scale.
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The pair joined Y Combinator’s Summer 2025 batch to build Astor: an AI advisor designed for the millions of American households that the traditional advisory industry has left behind.
An Advisor That Knows Your Portfolio
Astor connects to users’ existing brokerage accounts, evaluates their holdings across performance, risk, and diversification, and delivers tailored recommendations based on what the user owns. The platform is SEC-registered and operates under a fiduciary duty to act in clients’ best interest, setting it apart from social media advice and generic AI chatbots.
“Most people don’t need more investment products, they need someone in their corner. Astor gives people the knowledge and guidance to actually take control of their financial future”, said Fabiola Quinzaños, Partner at Monashees. “Bruno brings the investor perspective from his years at Monashees and the personal conviction of having lived this problem, while Daniel brings technical depth from building financial products at Stripe, and Bruno going from Monashees investor to Monashees-backed founder is the kind of full-circle story we love to be part of.”
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