Public Raises $135M Series D-2 For AI-Driven Investment

Investment platform Public announced Monday that it has raised $135 million in equity and debt financing amid sharp growth in adoption of its AI-enabled research features.

The financing, which New York-based Public described as a Series D-2, included $105 million in equity and $30 million in debt, with longtime backer Accel as the lead investor. Previously, the 5-year-old company had raised more than $300 million in venture funding.

Public’s fundraise comes amid a period of robust investment for developers of AI-enabled wealth management tools, a topic we tackled this week. So far this year, seed- through growth-stage investment in the wealth management space is running at roughly triple year-ago levels, per an analysis of Crunchbase data.

In addition to boosting AI capabilities, many startups are also focusing on offering investments in more asset classes and opening up historically difficult-to-access options to more of the masses.

Public is a case in point. The company started out in 2019 offering commission-free fractional stock investing, targeting younger, digital-native customers. Over the years it added social features, crypto, treasuries and fractional shares of fine art and collectibles. It’s recently expanded into corporate bonds.

The company says it is seeing particularly sharp growth for its embedded AI research tool, Alpha, which it reports is now used by more than 90% of members.

Like many investment startups, Public also anticipates particularly strong growth potential through generational wealth transfers. By 2045, the company estimates that $70 trillion of assets will be inherited by a generation of digital natives, with $28 trillion of that in the form of stocks and bonds.

Increasingly, those digital natives plan to be mostly autonomous in their investments, relying on automated tools to build and follow their portfolios, per Public. In tandem, they’re expecting those tools to offer ever-more sophisticated and comprehensible advice and portfolio tracking.