Q3 Tweener Founder Spotlight: Wealth Architect
Building high-quality financial planning for the vast majority of Americans who don’t have access to it.
Tweener Founder Spotlights
Tweener Founder Spotlights are about the story behind the startup, the moments, the motivations, and the people who decide a problem is worth solving.
For Wealth Architect, the problem wasn’t something Matt Bush discovered in a brainstorm. It was something he watched play out in real life, again and again, the kind of quiet stress that doesn’t show up on a balance sheet, but shapes decisions every day.
Matt Bush is the CEO and co-founder of Wealth Architect, alongside Colin Devine, where they’re building AI-powered financial planning that brings elite-level advice to people who have historically been priced out of it.
And the reason he’s building it is simple:
A huge portion of Americans are carrying financial anxiety as their number one stressor, and most of them don’t have a true solution.
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When Financial Anxiety Becomes the Problem Worth Solving
Lessons You’ll Hear Between the Lines
Matt’s story leaves a few takeaways that apply far beyond fintech:
Solve a problem with real emotional weight. People don’t think about money for four hours a day because it’s fun.
Prove the outcome before you perfect the product. A seven-page PDF and a 20-minute conversation validated the need better than a feature roadmap ever could.
Timing matters and technology shifts create openings. The mission existed in 2022. The breakthrough became possible once LLMs matured.
Expect everything to take longer. And plan accordingly.
The Gap Everyone Knows Exists (But No One Fixed)
Matt describes the personal finance landscape as divided, not because there aren’t tools, but because the market has been split in two.
On one end is high-quality financial advice, the kind that actually changes someone’s life, but it’s largely reserved for people with enough net worth to justify a dedicated financial planner.
On the other end is the consumer finance world, including budgeting apps, robo-advisors, and dashboards that show you a snapshot of your money.
“The reality is those don't actually do enough to deliver truly intelligent advice.”
The questions people are actually losing sleep over are different:
“Can I retire?”
“What levers do I have to change my future?”
“How do I pay for my kids’ college?”
“What should I do next, in my specific situation?”
According to Matt, this gap leaves most people without a real solution.
“There’s a population, about 75% of Americans, where financial anxiety is their number one stress,” he said. “They think about finances four hours a day, and unfortunately there’s no solution for those individuals.”
Wealth Architect is being built for that middle 75%, people who need real guidance, not a spreadsheet, but who have historically been priced out of high-quality financial planning.
“I Can’t Believe This Doesn’t Exist”
Wealth Architect didn’t start as a startup pitch deck. It started with Matt’s mom.
She’s a comprehensive financial planner, and in 2022 and 2023 she began getting the same question from companies over and over again: “Is there something you can do for our employees?”
On the surface, employee financial wellness programs already exist. But Matt had seen why most of them fall short. It was not because of intent, but because of structure.
A true financial plan takes time and real personalization takes hours. And a single human advisor can’t deliver that level of depth to hundreds or thousands of people without either becoming prohibitively expensive or diluting the advice until it’s generic and shallow.
At the time, Matt was still working in hedge funds (a career that ran from 2013 through 2024), and Wealth Architect wasn’t even an idea yet. But alongside that career, he’d spent years building with AI.
So when his mom laid out the problem, his instinct wasn’t theoretical. It was practical.
“What you’re describing,” Matt told her, “I could probably whip something up in a couple hundred hours.”
Working with a company as a design partner, they built what Matt calls a “financial plan light”, a deeply personalized, seven-page PDF generated in minutes. Employees would submit brokerage statements, Social Security earnings records, and additional personal information. The software Matt built would ingest the data and generate a customized plan in about two minutes.
His mom would then meet with each employee for 20 minutes to translate the plan, answer questions, and guide them through next steps.
What normally took hours was compressed into something fast, repeatable, and scalable. And then the signal became impossible to ignore.
They served more than 500 people, and the post-engagement survey came back 99% positive.
“People didn’t even know if they had enough to retire,” Matt said. “They didn’t know how much they’d have, or what levers they could pull to change their future.”
For many, it was the first time they’d ever had real financial clarity rather than just a dashboard or snapshot.
Watching that transformation at scale left Matt with one persistent question: “How has no one built this already?”
Matt discussing the concept behind Wealth Architect
The Moment Everything Clicked
Matt didn’t immediately start a company after that pilot. At the time, large language models weren’t mature enough and he was still deep in his hedge fund career.
However, after a few months of experimenting with ChatGPT, he had a moment of clarity.
He was at dinner with his mom, and it hit him: Everything they had done manually could now be automated with AI. Not just the calculations, but also the interaction layer, the part where a human explains the plan, answers follow-ups, and adjusts the strategy as goals evolve.
This could be a future where interacting with your finances feels like talking to a real advisor at a consumer price point.
“It's going to feel like you're actually interacting with a 99% lifelike advisor. That's going to feel natural and intuitive,” he explained. “That's going to be literally the cost of a Venti double pumped Frappuccino from Starbucks a month.”
A year later, the idea became real. After months of R&D, Matt built an early proof-of-concept where the AI could control a basic interface, manipulate data, and return the right outputs. That was the second click:
“When I started prompting a simple interface and watched it actually control things and come back with the right output, I thought, ‘whoa my gut instinct was right. This is going to work.’”
Stealth Mode Wasn’t a Vibe. It Was Strategy.
A lot of startups love to “build in public.” Wealth Architect did the opposite intentionally.
Their view is straightforward: personal finance is a space that people have been trying to solve for years, and most attempts fail because the approach isn’t right.
They believed they found a unique direction, with creative and custom AI architecture, and the last thing they wanted to do was hand that roadmap to the market before they had to.
“I’ve been watching three companies try to do it in the last six months and none of them have taken the right direction,” Matt shared. “The last thing we want is to give the direction until we have to.”
Matt expects fast followers once they launch, the same way every major AI breakthrough quickly becomes a crowded category. So they stayed quiet through fundraising, built the product, and planned to sprint when it was time.
Onsite team brainstorming meeting
The Hard Part That Doesn’t Make Headlines
Waiting was the strategy. But waiting was also the hard part.
Wealth Architect didn’t just choose to build in stealth, they chose to wait for the technology to catch up to the idea. That meant resisting the urge to rush, staying quiet while others tried and failed, and committing to a longer, more uncertain build.
And like most things in startups, it still took longer than expected. Matt thought the product would be ready by early 2025, but it took about six months longer. It wasn’t a crisis, but rather the reminder that building something is genuinely hard. Everything takes longer than you think.
That reality hits differently when life keeps moving. During the build, Matt was engaged and planning a wedding, a reminder that startups aren’t just professional decisions. They’re personal ones too.
What kept him moving wasn’t hype or momentum for momentum’s sake.
It was conviction.
“The idea of providing this kind of financial advice to tens of millions of Americans is incredibly motivating.”
Progress itself became fuel, even when the finish line moved. Features shipped. Systems worked. The vision stayed intact.
To manage the mental strain of a longer-than-expected build, Matt adopted a framework he now returns to often, one that prioritizes steadiness over urgency.
“It’s really just about saying: this is what I’m getting done this week, and then doing that again the next week,” he said. “You don’t want to get caught staring at the gap between where you are and where you’re trying to go.”
The long-term roadmap still matters. Every once in a while, you have to pick your head up and make sure you’re moving in the right direction, even if that moment feels daunting. But once the direction is set, Matt’s approach is to let the gap fade into the background.
“You deal with it emotionally, make sure you’re pointed the right way, and then you go week by week. That’s a lot more energizing.”
Because the hardest part of building isn’t the launch or the headlines, it’s staying steady while you wait for the moment to arrive.
What’s Next for Wealth Architect
At the time of our interview, Wealth Architect had just closed its fundraising round and hired its first two employees, bringing the team to four.
The Wealth Architect team grows to four!
The focus now is execution: bringing on beta users, learning quickly, and iterating in real time. Matt described their backend as intentionally built for speed, the kind where a thoughtful user request can become a shipped feature in hours.
The goal is straightforward: get the product into real hands, refine it against real needs, and then scale.
Matt sees this moment as part of something bigger.
“Every once in a while there’s a generational technological shift,” he said. “Web 1.0 and mobile were big ones. This is beyond the magnitude of any of those, because it’s the first time technology has scaled to the level of human intelligence.”
In Matt’s view, that shift has the potential to dramatically reduce the cost of high-quality services for everyday consumers.
And in personal finance, that could mean something profound: Less anxiety. More clarity. More control. Which is exactly what Wealth Architect is working to build.
Wealth Architect is now officially out of stealth.
If you’d like to explore the product, see how the team is rethinking AI-powered financial planning, or follow along as they scale, you can find Matt and Colin on LinkedIn and visit https://www.wealtharchitect.ai for more info.
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