A deep dive with Satyen Patel on how Eton Solutions is transforming wealth management through AI, innovation, and purpose-built fintech platforms.
Satyen, you’ve had experience in leading at global firms and later founded and scaled Cambridge Solutions. What are some key milestones that have shaped your professional journey?
Working for three leading fast-moving consumer goods companies for over 18 years across the globe laid the foundation of real-world experience that prepared me for the private equity (PE) world. At the turn of the century, I decided to pivot into IT. The Y2K scare and the dot-com crash revealed how much growth and opportunity remained in the sector. The 9-11 tragedy compounded that opportunity. In 2002, when enterprise valuations within the tech sector were at an all-time low, I launched a private equity fund with four partners focused on leveraging the east–west arbitrage in IT for the insurance industry.
Over the next eight years, we expanded organically and through acquisitions across North America, Europe, and APAC, growing revenue from $15 million to $450 million. The company became a leader in software development and services to the insurance industry and the second-largest software and services solution provider for U.S. workers’ compensation insurance, culminating in an IPO and eventual merger with another listed company.
That experience confirmed my conviction in the IT space, where I’ve continued to deliver purpose-built technology solutions for a range of industries.
Eton Solutions was born out of the unique challenges faced by a family office. Can you walk us through the origin story and what gaps in the market the company was founded to address?
Before Eton Solutions, there was Eton Advisors, a multi-family office where the concept for our platform first emerged. One of its partners, Robert E. Mallernee, sought a holistic technology solution to streamline investment advice and reduce manual middle- and back-office work. But the firm soon realized there was no off-the-shelf solution to meet its needs. Cobbling together multiple single point systems and trying to integrate them would require heavy IT and data-processing resources while continuing the cumbersome maintenance of multiple single point solutions and duplicate data entry points which opened the chances of errors in aggregation, reconciliation, and consolidation of reporting systems.
That challenge set Rob on a mission to create the all-in-one platform he needed for his multi-family office. Starting with minimal resources inside his own firm, he spent the next decade developing what became the Eton Solutions platform for his multi-family office.
I met Rob through a wine club and became a client before I fully understood the technology he was creating. Once I did, I joined as an investor and eventually as executive chairman to help scale the business, raise capital, and assemble a professional team with relevant industry experience. Drawing on my IT and financial services background, tapping former colleagues, and bringing in others from established giants within the fintech industry, we combined Rob’s domain expertise with enterprise-grade technology to bring the market-ready Eton Solutions platform to life.
From your perspective, what makes AtlasFive and EtonAI distinct, and how do they address the changing needs of wealth management firms?
Our AtlasFive® platform aggregates and manages all liquid and alternative assets—along with data, reporting, and workflows—on one comprehensive system of record creating a single source of truth. Wealth managers can integrate investment, accounting, and tax data in one place. Today, more than 960 of the world’s wealthiest families and institutions rely on AtlasFive to manage 130,000 entities, oversee 205,000+ investments, process $65 billion in annual bill payments, and handle over 14 million transactions each year.
Built on this robust integrated data foundation, EtonAI™ lets firms embed AI directly into their operations to drive efficiency and insight, offering more than 400 proven use cases for advanced automation and analytics. For both structured and unstructured data.
By contrast, most competing solutions are fragmented—separate single point solution tools for investments, taxes, and more—with no unified data layer for AI to build on. Solving that problem was the inspiration for founding Eton Solutions.
What do you see as the key drivers behind Eton Solutions’ growth to over $1 trillion in assets under management?
Several factors set us apart. First, our founder and CEO previously ran his own multi-family office for several years, after having led a trust company. That experience gave us firsthand insight into the unique challenges of the family office wealth management space. We combined that deep domain knowledge with the expertise of former Cambridge Solutions employees and other financial services professionals to design workflows and automated digital solutions that foster exceptional client relationships. By carefully integrating domain expertise with best-in-class technology, we created AtlasFive—an enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform for wealth management.
We also partner closely with clients to deliver purpose-built solutions shaped by their feedback—every new feature is tested in a real family-office environment before launch.
Finally, our rapid growth reflects the strength of our technology, which directly addresses the core pain points that family offices, trusts, PE firms, Funds, Business Managers, IRAs, Private Banks and ultra high net worth individuals face.
Eton Solutions is domiciled in the USA with its Global HQ in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina and International HQ in Singapore, a significant global hub for wealth management. Why are these locations strategically important for your current operations and future international expansion?
The centers for family offices are across the world in cities that hold the highest concentration of millionaires and billionaires. Our clients span all these major cities. To serve this wide client base, we have a substantial presence in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East/Africa.
Our Global HQ in North Carolina positions us to serve the North American market and houses our Executive Team. Our International HQ in Singapore enables us to better support our international clients. In addition, our Global Technology Centers are based in Bangalore, Shimoga, and GIFT City, India.
You recently closed a $58 million Series C round led by Navis Capital Partners. How will this funding accelerate your growth, and what specific areas will it be invested in?
The new funding will accelerate product innovation and AI development as we expand our solutions for the private-equity and funds market.
Next, we plan to democratize and broaden access to AtlasFive®, serving ultra-high-net-worth individuals with $25 million or more in assets—bringing technology once reserved for billionaires to a much wider audience at a compelling price value – thereby multiplying our total addressable market (TAM) by 25X.
Our growing product suite is built to support ultra-high net worth individuals, single- and multi-family offices, private equity firms, funds, registered investment advisors, trusts, accounting firms, business managers, and global private banks.
AI is transforming the wealth management landscape. How does EtonAI, built on the data foundation of AtlasFive, empower wealth managers to enhance efficiency and decision-making?
By combining AtlasFive’ s rich data with advanced AI, EtonAI turns time-consuming back-office tasks into automated processes and delivers insights that help wealth managers make faster, more informed decisions and devote more attention to client relationships.
With the solution, wealth managers can now:
- Automate document workflows: Processes 250+ document types to handle bill pay, private-equity paperwork, statements, tax filings, KYC, and audits with no manual hand-offs.
- Simplify reconciliations: Uploads transactions, codes GL entries, reconciles market values and cash, performs mark-to-market, and generates month-end reports automatically.
- Accelerate research: Research opportunities, drafts investment theses, automates due diligence, and evaluates investment health.
- Strengthen compliance: Runs estate-plan stress tests, regulatory audits, cash-flow projections, and legal-document reviews to reduce errors and risk.
- Boost productivity: Drafts communications, summarizes long documents and meetings, and creates action items and investor tear sheets on demand.
Eton Solutions initially focused on family offices, but you’re now expanding into private equity firms, accounting firms, and RIAs. What’s driving this diversification, and how are your solutions tailored to meet the needs of these new client segments?
Most family offices today are already leveraging our solution for investing into these segments and are using our platform to service all of them. So, it is a natural progression for our business. Additionally, the private equity segment is roughly 25 times larger than our current core addressable market while facing many of the same operational and technology application challenges.
To meet the needs of this differentiated client base, we are working directly with firms in these spaces to understand how the nuances differentiate from our core offering and then building solutions that meet those needs.
As you look ahead, what trends in the wealth and investment management industry do you believe will shape Eton Solutions’ roadmap and innovation strategy?
As we look ahead, we see several key trends shaping both our industry and Eton Solutions’ innovation strategy. We are singularly focused on creating the leading wealth management platform, powered by state-of-the-art technology, to serve the full spectrum of ultra-high-net-worth individuals’ needs. This includes not only wealth invested in securities but also physical assets such as homes, wine collections, art, and more. Our goal is to bring all of these diverse forms of wealth together on a single platform.
By aggregating this data into a holistic view, we empower our clients with timely insights—turning information into power and enabling them to manage their wealth with foresight rather than reacting in hindsight.
To achieve this, we remain committed to delivering solutions that are efficient, swift, and transparent, with privacy and cybersecurity at the core.
What advice would you give to emerging leaders in the wealth management or fintech space who are looking to drive meaningful innovation and long-term impact?
For emerging leaders in wealth management or fintech, my advice is to stick to your core strengths while building to last and keeping an eye on the future. By focusing on what you do best, you can innovate with confidence and clarity. At the same time, designing solutions and strategies that last ensures your work creates long-term impact, even as the industry continues to evolve.
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