Marloo secures $10 million in funding, spearheaded by Blackbird Ventures, to transform the AI notetaker into an AI operating system designed for financial advisers.

      Blackbird is reinforcing its commitment: it led both the pre-seed and the current seed round, holding 34% of the company now. Icehouse Ventures joined in as well. Founders Hardy Michel, Shakeel Lala, and Ben Robertson each maintain about 27% ownership. The next step is expanding into the US.

      Marloo, an AI firm based in London that caters to financial advisers, has secured $10 million in a seed round led by Blackbird Ventures, with participation from Icehouse Ventures. This funding round raises the total financing to $12.7 million in less than a year, with Blackbird also leading the $2.7 million pre-seed round in September 2025. Following both rounds, Blackbird's stake in Marloo stands at roughly 34%.

      Co-founders Hardy Michel and Shakeel Lala each hold around 27% of the company. The new funding will be allocated to bolstering Marloo's presence in the UK and Australia, entering the US market, and developing an expanded product suite aimed at becoming the essential operating system for financial advisory firms.

      Founded in 2024 by Hardy Michel, Shakeel Lala, and Ben Robertson, a third of Marloo's team comprises former financial advisers. The company started by addressing a common and persistent issue: financial advice is one of the most heavily regulated and documentation-heavy professions within financial services. Consequently, typical advisers invest a disproportionate amount of their time on administrative tasks, including meeting notes, compliance documents, file notes, client communications, and regulatory reporting, rather than offering advice itself.

      Before developing their product, the founders conducted interviews with around 800 potential customers to identify the specific pain points that would encourage adoption.

      Currently, Marloo produces advice documents, compliance workflows, and client context files, while maintaining an ongoing knowledge base of each adviser’s client relationships, which is accessible across various interactions.

      Blackbird general partner Samantha Wong expressed that the company aims to become something akin to what Canva achieved for design—a platform that does not replace designers but enhances accessibility, efficiency, and professionalism for a broader range of practitioners.

      “It reminds us of the early days of Canva,” Wong shared during both the September pre-seed announcement and the recent round, indicating that this comparison is based on conviction rather than mere marketing language.

      The traction metrics reported by Marloo are impressive for a company that has only been active for a year. Over 650 advisory firms in six countries are already paying customers. Revenue has surged by more than 40% month-on-month for eleven consecutive months, with reported customer churn nearing zero—an indicator in enterprise SaaS that is often seen as a stronger sign of product-market fit than any growth rate.

      Testimonials from individual users included in the announcement report a 90% client closing rate, a fourfold increase in productivity, time savings of seven to ten hours per week, and a considerable reduction in the time required to create advice documents—from previous durations of eight hours to under four now.

      While these testimonials are company-sourced rather than audited, the volume and detail of the claims align with a product that has become truly integrated into daily workflows, rather than merely an unused tool.

      Addressing the competitive risk often raised by observers, Shakeel Lala directly confronted the concern regarding whether large AI laboratories like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google would develop tools that could overshadow specialized AI companies serving specific professions.

      He argued that this risk is overrated in this sector. “An AI tool like Claude can summarize a meeting, but it lacks the ability to integrate the multiple layers of context necessary to produce a usable output that adheres to legal and regulatory standards, a firm's internal policies, and adviser preferences,” he stated.

      “AI outputs are naturally non-deterministic, while advice is a profession built on trust and proof-based determinism.”

      This perspective highlights the critical tension between probabilistic AI outputs and the compliance demands inherent in regulated financial advice, forming the strongest argument for the vertical AI moat: it's not so much about proprietary technology but rather that the compliance and institutional context needed to make such technology applicable is difficult to replicate without significant domain knowledge.

      The US expansion will be a strategic litmus test. Currently, Marloo's strongest markets are the UK and Australia, both of which are relatively concentrated and compliance-intensive financial advice markets with well-defined regulatory frameworks and established documentation standards.

      In contrast, the US market is larger, more fragmented, and governed by a complex mix of federal and state regulations. Developing compliance-ready AI documentation tools for the US advisory market necessitates rebuilding the institutional knowledge that Marloo has gained in its existing markets, which will be a challenge for a founding team with direct experience in the UK and Australia as they navigate a new regulatory landscape.

      The $10 million in seed funding should provide the necessary resources to initiate the US expansion; however, establishing a significant market presence will depend on how swiftly the company can replicate its UK and