Astor Founders: The Brazilian Duo Building AI Financial Advice for All

In Brazil, opening a brokerage account usually comes with a financial advisor attached, regardless of how much money you're putting in. Bruno Koba and Daniel Tulha grew up with that as the norm.

When they moved to the United States, they noticed something odd. Most Americans invest entirely on their own.

Traditional advisors typically require $500,000 or more in assets before they'll take you on as a client.

Only about 35% of Americans work with one at all, and among adults under 30, that number drops below 5%.

That gap is what led Koba and Tulha to found Astor, an AI-native investment advisory platform.

The company has now raised a $5 million seed round led by Monashees, with participation from Y Combinator, Goodwater Capital, and executives from Stripe and OpenAI.

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Two Very Different Paths Into the Same Problem

Koba and Tulha bring genuinely different backgrounds to the company, and that split shows up clearly in how Astor is built.

Koba previously worked as a fintech investor at Monashees and as a data scientist at Nubank, where he built machine learning models used to extend credit to millions of Brazilians.

Tulha spent his career on the engineering side, building financial infrastructure at Stripe, Robinhood, and Amazon.

There's a neat bit of symmetry worth noting here. Koba went from being a Monashees investor to being a Monashees-backed founder, something the firm's own partner has pointed out as a rare full-circle moment they don't often get to be part of.

The two joined Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch to build Astor together.

What Astor Actually Does

Astor connects directly to a user's existing brokerage account. It evaluates holdings across performance, risk, and diversification, then delivers personalized recommendations through a conversational AI interface, by text or voice.

Koba has pointed to a specific behavior he noticed among people around him: many investors were treating their brokerage accounts like a casino, without much of a plan.

His read on the US market was blunt. Unless you're wealthy, he said, essentially nobody is paying close attention to your money.

Here's what separates Astor from just being "another AI chatbot for stocks." The platform is registered with the SEC as an investment advisor, meaning it operates under a fiduciary duty, a legal obligation to act in the client's best interest.

Koba has said he personally obtained a Series 65 advisor license, and that Astor's recommendations go through the firm's own fact-checking agents before reaching a user.

That's a meaningfully higher bar than a general-purpose chatbot answering finance questions casually.

Koba has drawn that contrast directly, noting that plenty of people already ask ChatGPT or Claude these kinds of questions, but that those tools weren't built or optimized specifically for personal finance the way Astor's multi-agent system is.

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The Money and the Traction So Far

The $5 million seed round was led by Monashees, with participation from Y Combinator, Goodwater Capital, Gilgamesh Ventures, 468 Capital, Valutia, Sunshine Lake, and individual investors from Stripe and OpenAI.

At the time of the announcement, Astor reported thousands of users and more than $200 million in connected brokerage accounts.

More recent figures cited on the company's own product page put those numbers higher, at over 5,000 users and more than $300 million connected, though that later figure comes from Astor's own marketing rather than an independent report.

Pricing is straightforward: $15 a month for the standard tier, $40 a month for an unlimited Pro version. As of the funding announcement, the company said it had around 4,000 paying customers.

The company says the new capital will go toward growing its product, engineering, and growth teams, and expanding its service lines beyond general portfolio guidance into things like credit card management and broader financial planning.

The Honest Competitive Picture

Astor is not entering an empty market.

Robo-advisors have existed for roughly a decade, and larger platforms like Robinhood are actively building their own next-generation AI advisory tools with far bigger existing user bases.

Traditional advisory firms are also moving into this space, partnering directly with AI labs including Anthropic to offer AI-assisted guidance to their already wealthy client base.

Astor's bet is that its narrower focus, being built specifically and only for personal finance, combined with real regulatory registration, gives it an edge over general-purpose AI tools and legacy advisors alike.

Whether that differentiation holds up against much better-funded competitors moving into the same space is the open question that will determine if this seed round turns into something larger.

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