NextCapital lands $30M Series C to grow its team and platform

NextCapital just landed the first big round of 2018.

The startup has announced a $30 million Series C. The round was led by Oak HC/FT, a venture capital firm out of Greenwich, Connecticut, and also featured participation from existing investors Manulife Financial, Transamerica Ventures, Vermont Seed Capital Fund and Route 66 Ventures.

Oak HC/FT co-founder and general partner Patricia Kemp will join the NextCapital board of directors and venture partner Dan Petrozzo will join the board as an observer.

“Oak HC/FT is an excellent investor,” said president Dirk Quayle. “In addition to investing, they bring experience. They have a lot of good strategic input and recognize that we have a pretty unique enterprise model.”

NextCapital's platform is used by financial institutions to offer clients personalized and automated financial advice. Its software helps users plan for retirement and provides a single place for monitoring investment accounts. According to Quayle, part of NextCapital's Series C will be used to accelerate the development of its platform.

“We want to add new features to the personalized advice function of the platform," said Quayle. "We also want to make the platform more configurable, customizable and scalable for our partners. Additionally, there are plans to extend into new markets by offering new functionalities for financial advisors."

Right now we’re at 95 employees and we’ll be making a pretty substantial increase in that over the next year.”

In addition to investing in its platform, Quayle said NextCapital will expand into new markets by offering new functionalities for financial advisors. To accomplish these goals, the company will do some hiring.

“Right now we’re at 95 employees and we’ll be making a pretty substantial increase in that over the next year,” Quayle said. “We’ll probably be growing that by at least a third. The engineering team will be our main area of hiring, but we’ll also grow our portfolio management team as well.”

NextCapital’s Series C pushes its total funding to over $54 million. The company raised its last round, an $18 million Series B, in November of 2015.

“The $15 trillion U.S. retirement savings market is going through seismic change — from a regulatory, technology, and consumer perspective,” said Kemp.  “NextCapital is uniquely positioned to enable the transformation of the U.S. retirement industry and the way Americans save for retirement.”