PlannerPal raises $6M from Mercia Ventures as AI for UK financial advice moves beyond note-taking

PlannerPal has pulled in $6 million in fresh funding, with Mercia Ventures leading the round and Ada Ventures joining again after backing the company’s pre-seed in February 2024. The startup is building AI for UK financial advisers, but it is trying to move the category on from the now-familiar job of turning meetings into notes.

More than 250 UK advice firms already use PlannerPal, according to the company. That list includes Canaccord Wealth, ValidPath and Amber River. PlannerPal says those firms oversee around £150 billion in client assets, and it says 20% of the UK’s top 20 wealth managers are customers. By its own count, that means four of the top 20.

The company’s pitch is that the first wave of adviser AI was about removing admin, while the next one is about making the data useful. PlannerPal links client conversations, documents and CRM records so firms can build better client files and use them across the business. Whitcroft, its CEO and co-founder, says advisers are sitting on a huge amount of valuable information that is scattered across systems. He argues the bigger opportunity is not just capturing it, but making it work better.

And PlannerPal has built itself to live inside the tools advisers already use. It is embedded in Iress Xplan, where users can launch it through single sign-on, and it also connects with Intelliflo, Curo, Plannr, Microsoft Teams, Zoom and SharePoint. The company says it is the only AI partner chosen for the Iress Partnership, and Financial Reporter says its Xplan CRM Updater covers 400 data fields in the standard Xplan fact find.

The new money will go into engineering, product, customer rollouts and what PlannerPal calls client intelligence features. It is also pushing into mortgages, with Charles Cameron named as its new client there. The market is clearly not short of attention: peers like Nevis, Zocks, Saturn and Marloo have all raised larger rounds, and the FCA’s own survey found AI is already in the mix for most large advice firms. PlannerPal’s bet is simple enough: the winner will be the one plugged most deeply into the adviser’s daily systems, not the prettiest standalone app.