(The San Diego Union-Tribune) - San Diego estate planning startup Trust & Will has landed a $15 million infusion of cash from strategic investors — a move that the company thinks will be enough to push it to profitability over the next year or so.
The roughly 80-employee firm, which aims to become the Turbo Tax of estate planning, raised the money from Amex Ventures, Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures, SEI Ventures and USAA. Since it was founded in 2017, Trust & Will has raised a total of $48 million.
“When we went to the board (of directors) and said, ‘Look, we have an opportunity to bring strategic investors to the capitalization table, and it will give us the cash to get to profitability,’ they liked that narrative because the (venture capital) market all of last year and continuing into 2023, it has been really rough times for so many companies,” said co-ofunder and Chief Executive Cody Barbo.
Trust & Will is an online estate planning platform that helps individuals and couples create legally binding wills, trusts, powers of attorney, and other estate documents.
According to the company, nearly 60 percent of U.S. adults do not have a will or trust. Trust & Will tailors documents to meet guidelines of individual states and counties. Last fall, it added probate and estate settlement services to its platform.
Customers pay a one-time fee to create trusts and wills, and they can opt for an annual subscription to store their documents on the company’s cloud service and make revisions online.
Barbo said the company had doubled revenue each year since 2020 and has grown to about half a million members — led by internet-savvy millennials who are beginning to need estate planning. He expects the company to reach profitability in the first half of 2024.
In this latest round of funding, Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures is a return investor, having first backed Trust & Will in 2020. SEI Ventures, USAA and Amex Ventures are new investors.
“Estate planning is an essential pillar of sound consumer financial wellness. Yet today, the process is complex, antiquated, and expensive,” said Margaret Lim, managing director at Amex Ventures, in a statement. “Trust & Will is modernizing the estate planning industry with a simple, fast, and affordable way to set up an estate plan online.”
By Mike Freeman
February 24, 2023
