Last week, I was privileged to serve as one of four judges at the AdviceTech competition, which was part of the 11th annual XYPN Live conference held in Austin, Texas.
This particular competition made history in that it was the first time a competitor, Waterlily, had ever won both Best in Show, which is selected by the judges, and the Advicer’s Choice award, which is voted on by XYPN Live attendees.
Both were announced simultaneously later in the day without anyone from either body knowing how the other had voted.
“What we built is AI that creates the most fiduciary end-to-end long-term care planning process,” said Lily Vittayarukskul, Waterlily’s co-founder and CEO, during a wide-ranging Q&A held with five of the six competing startups the next day.
“That AI predicts what that client’s future long-term care trajectory and the risk is going to be, the associated cost and a separate set of AI that helps around the protection solutions as well and ensuring that completion,” she said, adding that Waterlily has hundreds of independent advisors on the platform.
It was a family tragedy and consequent draining of her family’s assets that drew Vittayarukskul to the problem of long-term care, according to a January TechCrunch article.
Finding long-term care and paying for it is already a challenge for many, but she and co-founder Evan Ehrenberg (who is also COO), brought up during the Q&A how the continued waves of baby boomers—around 10,000 of them turning 65 every day according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the Pew Research Center—as well as rising healthcare inflation are going to make the problem worse.
“You have this massive upcoming demand on long-term care, and there are not enough long-term care providers to meet that demand,” she said.
While Waterlily cannot fix that problem, it can help address the lack of planning or offload it for many advisors. It can also help foster advisor-client discussions by providing planners and advisors with the necessary tools to at least begin having conversations earlier (Waterlily supports working with clients 40 and older).
“This is part of a holistic plan, this is one of the most dangerous things impacting your retirement,” said Ehrenberg, who noted that 73% of Waterlily’s current users are wealth advisors, which he said was unexpected, as the duo initially anticipated that their typical user would be long-term care insurance specialists. However, he said, many of them have their preferred carriers, and comparison shopping and analysis for them and their often-wealthy clientele is unnecessary. It is a different story for fiduciary wealth managers.
Waterlily has raised close to $10 million to this point, with its first funding coming in the form of an initial $2.2 million from the growth-oriented venture firm Insight Partners.
That was followed by another $7 million from Brewer Lane Ventures and led by John Kim, a founding partner at the firm and former president and CIO of New York Life (who had previously run divisions at Prudential, Cigna and Aetna).
While the amounts have not been disclosed, part of the funding has also come from Genworth, Nationwide and Edward Jones Ventures.
Vittayarukskul said that over the last 18 months Waterlily had closed contracts to work with three Fortune 100 companies, three Fortune 500 and one Fortune 1,000 companies, all still under NDA.
“We’ll be launching early 2026 with one of the top four broker/dealers,” she said, but it too remains under NDA.
As for advisor integrations, the pair said that it was in discussions with three of the advisory industry’s most popular financial planning providers, as well as three of its most popular CRM providers. But they declined to name them.
The other competitors included FinDash, FINNY, Impruve, Vitals AI and YourStake, which I plan to write about in future columns, as each is worthy of coverage and solves different problems within the advisor technology landscape.
Prospecting and lead generation technology provider FINNY was awarded an honorable mention at this year’s competition.
I’ve written about FINNY several times, and it won a WealthManagement.com Industry Award in September in the Artificial Intelligence-Marketing and Lead Generation category.
The XYPN conference was, by any measure I can think of to compare such events, an impressive affair, with more than 800 member attendees out of a total membership of 2,100; it was well run, with excellent programming (and good food).
Fellow judges included XYPN co-founder Michael Kitces, advisor technology consultant Craig Iskowitz and Aureus Advantage founder Amy DeTolla.
Criteria for participating in the competition required that the technology must be for financial “advicers” (defined as those in the business of providing financial advice for a fee) “and support running a business where financial advice, and the financial advicers themselves, are the primary value.”
The competitors also had to meet one or more of the following requirements: be an existing company with a new offering, substantively different from its existing solutions, independently priced, have less than $1 million in annual revenue and have launched within the last 12 months.
Advisors will surely hear and see more about Waterlily and its small but growing team in the days ahead as it is applying AI to simplify what has always been a difficult, time-consuming analytical problem with a tremendous number of variables and potential inputs for any single person or couple looking at long-term care options and insurance.
