
Sava
The agentic trust company — building the future of trusts.
$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
- 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]
- 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]
- 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]
- 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.
How It Works
Charter + data integration → AI agents → human-over-the-loop → real-time portals.
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]
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.
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.
Founder deep dive
Two repeat founders with complementary surface area — consumer, B2B, and capital markets.
Founders
Risks & mitigations
What we're watching
References
- [1]Sava — The intelligence layer for enduring legacies
- [2]Institute for Policy Studies — Billionaire Enabler States (trust states overview)
- [3]Cerulli — $84T wealth transfers through 2045
- [4]Trust & Will — Trustee fees overview
- [5]Wealth Access — FIS case study (manual to single portal productivity)
- [6]Grossman Law — Trust distribution timelines
- [7]WealthManagement — FP Alpha enhances AI-driven estate planner (advisor demand, doc intelligence)
- [8]Mezzi — AI vs. manual trust administration (costs and cycle times)
- [9]Valur — QSBS solutions (founder demand validation)
- [10]InvestmentNews — Wealth.com and Vanilla expand among advisors
- [11]OpenAI — Morgan Stanley advisor assistant
- [12]Allwork — JPMorgan adopts AI for 60,000 employees
- [13]IBISWorld — Trusts & Estates in the U.S. (industry analysis)
- [14]InvestmentNews — RIA snapshot: $144.6T AUM
- [15]IRS — Estate & trust returns (Form 1041) statistics
- [16]Trustate — Estate/trust admin software for professionals
- [17]WealthHub Solutions — Trust administration software
- [18]Trust & Will — Series C funding and AI initiatives
- [19]YC Lightcone / Podwise — The 7 Most Powerful Moats for AI Startups
- [20]OC Elder Law — Trust administration cost overview
- [21]Hancock Whitney — Costs of maintaining a trust
- [22]Just Vanilla — The Estate Tech Revolution Is Picking Up Speed


