Sava

Sava

The agentic trust company — building the future of trusts.

Sava — Launch[1]

$84T

Wealth transfer

Through 2045 · 42% from HNW/UHNW

$5–6T

Trust assets

U.S. personal trusts · still paper-based

$144.6T

RIA AUM

~15.8K SEC-registered RIAs

Thesis

Sava is building an AI-powered, chartered trust company — "agentic trust infrastructure" that unifies real-time data aggregation, automated fiduciary workflows, and advisor/client portals under a single regulated trustee.[1] The wedge is high-WTP founder use cases like QSBS planning; the long arc is owning the trustee layer for the $84T wealth transfer.[3] [9]
  1. 01

    Trusts are a perfect vertical-AI problem. Trust administration is rules-driven, repetitive, and document-heavy — ideal terrain for vertical AI that can parse instruments, validate distribution requests, and surface edge cases for human review. Most incumbents still run on legacy accounting systems, PDFs, and quarterly reporting.[5] [6]

  2. 02

    Owning the charter creates a structural moat. Becoming the regulated executor requires capital, exams, supervised operations, and ongoing compliance — not something a pure software vendor can wrap into a SaaS feature. Once Sava is trustee of record, each administered trust compounds proprietary audit trails, document interpretations, and exception cases that competitors cannot replicate.[19]

  3. 03

    Advisors are the distribution engine. Estate and trust support has become table stakes for RIAs, but most lack a modern trustee they can actually work with. Sava gives them a live system of record — real-time data, status, and workflow APIs — so the advisor, attorney, and trustee stay in sync. That makes Sava the default referral for new trust setups and ongoing admin.[7] [10]

  4. 04

    The founders have done this before. Nimit co-founded Fullstack Academy (YC S12, acquired) and Bloomspot (acquired by JPMorgan Chase). Rush founded Framework.so (3M+ users, $10M+ in customer sales) and spent his first five years on the buy side in investment management — the rare combination of consumer growth instincts and capital-markets fluency this category needs.

Problem

Trusts hold trillions of dollars and still run on paper.

U.S. personal trusts hold $5–6T+ of assets, and trust administration is one of the last remaining corners of financial services that has not been re-platformed.[2] Most trust departments still run on legacy accounting systems, PDF reporting, and manual reconciliations. Distributions are slow, reports are quarterly, and advisors get little real-time visibility into the trusts they're trying to coordinate around.[5] [6]

At the household level, the experience suppresses adoption. Millions of families would benefit from trusts for tax, liability, and multi-generational planning, but opaque setup, slow administration, and fragmented stakeholders push them away. Advisors routinely recommend trusts and routinely struggle to get clients through the operational friction.

The fee pool that funds all of this is enormous. Trustee and admin fees commonly run 0.3%–1.0%+ of assets, with traditional fees of 0.5–1.5% and minimums — roughly $100K/yr on a $10M trust — pointing to both the value being captured today and the room for efficiency-priced disruption.[4] [20] [21]

$5–6T

U.S. personal trust assets

Mostly analog and siloed

0.3–1.5%

Annual trustee/admin fees

~$100K/yr on a $10M trust

1041s

Trust & estate returns

Filed annually at scale

Why Now

An $84T wealth transfer meets credible AI in regulated finance.

Two tailwinds converge: the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history is now actively underway, and AI has crossed the bar for high-stakes, regulated financial workflows.

$84T is changing hands — and most of it is trust-shaped.

Wealth transfer at scale. Cerulli projects $84T in wealth transfers through 2045, with 42% coming from HNW and UHNW households — the trust-intensive segment with the highest willingness to pay and the most acute operational pain.[3] Every dollar that moves through this transfer touches trust formation, administration, distribution planning, or all three.

Advisors are leaning in. Estate and trust capabilities have shifted from "nice to have" to table stakes for RIAs, with $144.6T of AUM across ~15.8K SEC-registered firms looking for modern trust infrastructure they can plug into.[14] [7] [10]

AI in regulated finance is now credible. Morgan Stanley's advisor assistant and JPMorgan rolling AI to 60,000 employees have set the bar for AI being deployed in high-stakes, audited financial workflows with human oversight. Trust administration — rules-driven, document-heavy, low-tolerance for error — is exactly the kind of work that benefits.[11] [12]

We're building the agentic trust company: the trustee of record, with AI doing the work that used to take a back office and a stack of PDFs.
Sava — company thesis[1]

How It Works

Charter + data integration → AI agents → human-over-the-loop → real-time portals.

Step 01

Regulated trust operations

State trust charter, fiduciary accounting, KYC/AML, auditable logs, distribution execution, and exam readiness — Sava is the trustee of record, not just a vendor.[1]

Step 02

Real-time data integration

Direct custodian feeds (e.g., Schwab, Fidelity) and advisor systems replace quarterly PDF sprawl and manual reconciliations with continuous, structured data.[5]

Step 03

AI workflow automation

Document intelligence ingests trust instruments and maps provisions to structured rules; distribution and compliance agents validate requests against terms and stage auditable packets for rapid human sign-off; event-driven alerts track recurring tasks and flag law/policy changes.[8]

Step 04

Portals & APIs

Advisor dashboards with multi-trust view, status, and alerts; role-based client access; and APIs for embedding trust data and requests directly into advisor or fintech front-ends.[1]

Episodic, manual workflows become continuous, auditable operations.

Document intelligence. Sava ingests trust instruments and extracts the provisions that matter — distribution standards, tax clauses, trustee powers, beneficiary rights — and maps them into structured rules the rest of the system can reason over.[7]

Distribution and compliance. When a distribution request comes in, the system validates it against the instrument terms, applies tax, withholding, and KYC controls, and stages an auditable packet for rapid human sign-off — collapsing what is often a multi-week back-and-forth into a same-day decision with a full audit trail.[8] [6]

Event-driven oversight. Background agents track recurring tasks (annual reviews, GST filings) and flag legal or policy changes that affect specific trusts — so the trustee can act in days, not at the next quarterly review.[1]

Human-over-the-loop, by design. High-confidence automation handles the routine; expert review is required on critical steps. Every agent and human action is logged — for the regulator, for the advisor, for the family.[1] [8]

Market

A fee pool worth tens of billions, expanding under the $84T transfer.

U.S. personal trust assets sit at $5–6T+ today and remain structurally underserved.[2] Trustee and admin fees commonly run 0.3%–1.0%+ of assets, with traditional charges of 0.5–1.5% and minimums implying roughly $100K/yr on a $10M trust — even at the midpoint, tens of billions in annual fee revenue.[4] [20] [21]

The wealth-transfer overlay is what makes the timing acute. Cerulli's $84T figure through 2045, with 42% from HNW/UHNW households, drives both new trust formation and ongoing administration. Meanwhile, ~15.8K SEC-registered RIAs sitting on $144.6T of AUM are actively looking for modern trust operations to embed into their service stack.[3] [14]

The IRS data backstops the volume: millions of trust and estate returns (1041s) are filed each year. Even modest share penetration translates into substantial AUA and AUA-linked fees over time.[15] [13]

Near term — QSBS and founder liquidity

Founders pursuing Section 1202 (QSBS) optimization via trust "stacking" — time-sensitive, complex, advisory-heavy, and underserved by today's solutions. High WTP, fast cycles, naturally referenceable wins inside the YC and broader founder community.[9]

Long term — trustee for the wealth transfer

Expand from QSBS into broader trust types — dynasty trusts, GRATs, CRTs, special-needs trusts — with shared infrastructure and templates, then expose APIs to fintechs and family offices: "trusts as a service" for the $84T transfer.[3] [1]

Competitive landscape

Software vendors stop at planning. Bank trust departments stop at the 1990s.

Each category has a structural ceiling — usually because they're missing either the charter or the AI. Sava is the only one operating with both.

Legacy bank trust departments

Scaled incumbents

Brand, balance sheet, and existing UHNW distribution — but manual operations, slow distributions, limited advisor APIs, and zero meaningful transparency. They can't rebuild their back offices around AI without dismantling the team running them.

Vanilla · Wealth.com

Estate-planning software

Advisor-facing estate planning, visualizations, and document tools — modern UX and real distribution. But they stop at the documents: no trust company, no fiduciary execution, no system of record once the trust is signed.[10]

FP Alpha

Document intelligence

AI parsing of estate documents to surface insights for advisors. Useful decision support — but the workflow ends at insight. There's no fiduciary execution layer underneath.[7]

Trustate · WealthHub

Software for incumbents

Trustate (YC W21) builds task automation and checklists for trust professionals; WealthHub provides Salesforce-based trust ops CRM/BPM. Both sell tools to existing trust companies — they don't own the fiduciary execution themselves.[16]

Valur

QSBS concierge

Venture-backed QSBS and tax strategies with founder education and fast document turnaround — overlapping with Sava's wedge. Relies on external trustees, however, with narrower scope than a fully integrated trust company.[9]

Trust & Will

D2C, retail

Series C, mass-market wills and living trusts with AI initiatives. Different motion entirely — retail rather than HNW/UHNW, and no professional trustee role for ongoing administration.[18]

Pure software vendors cannot automate fiduciary decisions without the charter. Incumbents cannot rebuild their ops around AI without dismantling them. Sava is the only path with both.
Sava — positioning[1]

Founder deep dive

Two repeat founders with complementary surface area — consumer, B2B, and capital markets.

Nimit's track record. Nimit co-founded and led Fullstack Academy (YC S12), which scaled into one of the most recognized coding bootcamps in the U.S. before being acquired. Before that he co-founded Bloomspot — a consumer commerce business that raised ~$46M and was acquired by JPMorgan Chase, giving him direct line-of-sight into how a large U.S. bank thinks about regulated consumer financial products. Earlier still, he co-founded Yahoo! MapMixer and was a senior software engineer on Yahoo Maps and Yahoo Travel.

Why this matters for Sava. Sava is a category that punishes founders who only know one half of the problem. You need the chops to build modern software and the literacy to operate inside a regulated financial entity. Nimit has shipped both — including running an acquisition through JPMorgan's diligence and integration.

Rush's track record. Rush spent the first five years of his career on the buy side in investment management — the same world Sava's RIA and family-office customers live in. He then founded Framework.so, an online creator platform backed by Kevin Rose, scaling it to over 3M end users and generating $10M+ in sales for customers including Ryan Holiday and Columbia University. Earlier, he built Zolt, a news summarizer app featured by the App Store, nominated for a Webby, and covered by TechCrunch.

Why the pair works. Nimit brings the CEO-of-an-acquired-fintech profile and the technical depth to build the regulated stack. Rush brings consumer-growth instincts and direct buy-side experience with the exact customers Sava sells to. Both are repeat founders. Both have shipped at scale. Together they cover the full surface area Sava needs: regulated infrastructure, advisor distribution, and product velocity.

Founders

Nimit Maru

Nimit Maru

Repeat FounderExited

Co-founder & CEO

Co-founder & CEO at Sava. Previously co-founder & CEO at Fullstack Academy (YC S12, acquired) and co-founder at Bloomspot ($46M raised, acquired by JPMorgan Chase). Co-founder of Yahoo! MapMixer and senior software engineer on Yahoo Maps/Travel. Three repeat-founder cycles, two acquisitions, and a career spent shipping consumer and B2B software at scale.

Rush Sadiwala

Rush Sadiwala

Repeat Founder

Co-founder & COO

Co-founder & COO at Sava. Previously founder at Framework.so (online creator platform backed by Kevin Rose) — scaled to 3M+ end users and generated $10M+ in sales for customers including Ryan Holiday and Columbia University. Built Zolt, a news summarizer app featured by the App Store, nominated for a Webby, and covered by TechCrunch. Spent the first five years of his career on the buy side in investment management.

Risks & mitigations

Risk

Regulatory approval and ongoing exams — a state trust charter requires capital, supervised operations, exams, and ongoing compliance.

Mitigation

Phase operations from a trust-friendly jurisdiction; hire seasoned trust officers and compliance leadership; design human-over-the-loop controls and auditable logs from day one so regulators see the AI as a transparency feature rather than a black box.

Risk

Fiduciary liability for errors — a single bad distribution or missed filing can produce outsized legal exposure and reputational damage.

Mitigation

Dual control on critical steps, deterministic checklists, agent action logs, E&O and fiduciary insurance, and an explicit policy of expanding automation only after passing internal eval thresholds on each workflow.

Risk

Conservative buyer skepticism — attorneys, RIAs, and UHNW families are slow to swap incumbents and instinctively cautious about AI in fiduciary roles.

Mitigation

Advisor- and attorney-led referrals, early UHNW founder wins around QSBS, reviewer-friendly workpapers and status pages, and speed/accuracy case studies that make the value undeniable on a single transaction.

Risk

Incumbent response — bank trust departments or estate-software players (Vanilla, Wealth.com) extend into chartered trust administration.

Mitigation

Lean into the charter moat, AI/data lead, and advisor integrations; offer partner or white-label paths for vendors that lack a trustee entity; counter-position on transparency, speed, and real-time advisor APIs.

What we're watching

  • Charter status — clean approval in the lead state and the public unveiling of the regulated entity.
  • First QSBS wins — referenceable founder/liquidity-event setups that prove the wedge and seed advisor referrals.
  • Design-partner expansion — converting the T&E attorney and RIA design-partner cohort into recurring advisor distribution.
  • Automation rate — the share of fiduciary workflows running with high-confidence AI under expert review (and how quickly the manual share trends down).

References

  1. [1]Sava — The intelligence layer for enduring legacies
  2. [2]Institute for Policy Studies — Billionaire Enabler States (trust states overview)
  3. [3]Cerulli — $84T wealth transfers through 2045
  4. [4]Trust & Will — Trustee fees overview
  5. [5]Wealth Access — FIS case study (manual to single portal productivity)
  6. [6]Grossman Law — Trust distribution timelines
  7. [7]WealthManagement — FP Alpha enhances AI-driven estate planner (advisor demand, doc intelligence)
  8. [8]Mezzi — AI vs. manual trust administration (costs and cycle times)
  9. [9]Valur — QSBS solutions (founder demand validation)
  10. [10]InvestmentNews — Wealth.com and Vanilla expand among advisors
  11. [11]OpenAI — Morgan Stanley advisor assistant
  12. [12]Allwork — JPMorgan adopts AI for 60,000 employees
  13. [13]IBISWorld — Trusts & Estates in the U.S. (industry analysis)
  14. [14]InvestmentNews — RIA snapshot: $144.6T AUM
  15. [15]IRS — Estate & trust returns (Form 1041) statistics
  16. [16]Trustate — Estate/trust admin software for professionals
  17. [17]WealthHub Solutions — Trust administration software
  18. [18]Trust & Will — Series C funding and AI initiatives
  19. [19]YC Lightcone / Podwise — The 7 Most Powerful Moats for AI Startups
  20. [20]OC Elder Law — Trust administration cost overview
  21. [21]Hancock Whitney — Costs of maintaining a trust
  22. [22]Just Vanilla — The Estate Tech Revolution Is Picking Up Speed