BlackRock Acquires Sequoia-Backed FutureAdvisor

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is acquiring FutureAdvisor, a five-year-old, San Francisco-based online financial advisory firm that aims to help people manage their investment accounts. According to the Financial Times, FutureAdvisor was picked up for between $150 million and $200 million.

The company had raised $21.5 million from investors, shows CrunchBase.

A Y Combinator alum, FutureAdvisor had first raised seed funding from high-profile angels like Keith Rabois and Jeremy Stoppelman before landing $5 million in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital in 2012. Last year, it raised $15.5 million in Series B funding led by Canvas Venture Fund. Its valuation at the time was a reported $75 million.

BlackRock says it doesn’t plan to target individual investors with the new acquisition; instead, it’s planning to use FutureAdvisor’s technology to enable banks and brokerage firms and the like to more seamlessly serve affluent investors. (FutureAdvisor had been expressly targeting consumers with between $100,000 and $1 million to invest.)

FutureAdvisor was co-founded by Bo Lu and Jon Xu, both former program managers for Microsoft. The company employed roughly 55 40 people. According to a BlackRock spokeswoman, FutureAdvisor will operate as a standalone unit of BlackRock Solutions and the firm will continue to employee all of those people, including Lu and Xu, who will retain leadership of the unit.