So Chen founded NewRetirement, a Mill Valley-based company building software to help people create financial retirement plans.
Today, NewRetirement’s direct-to-consumer products power financial planning for 70,000 users managing close to $100 billion in their own financial plans, according to Chen.
And while 37% of respondents say that they work with a financial adviser, two-thirds of Americans believe that their financial planning needs improvement, according to Northwestern Mutual’s Planning and Progress Study 2023.
Now, you might wonder, what makes NewRetirement different from startups like Retirable, which similarly provides an array of retirement planning tools and access to asset managers?
Chen asserts that NewRetirement is one of the few — and perhaps only — financial planning platform that serves consumers as well as advisers and workplaces.
But despite this being the case, rarely are solutions teams adequately staffed and resourced, according to entrepreneur Dan Chen.
So with his friend Michael Graczyk (with whom Chen also co-founded Hero), he created Quilt, a platform that hosts AI assistants for solutions sales teams.
Surveys show that many businesses are concerned about the privacy and security risks associated with generative AI.
But the majority believe generative AI has the potential to boost productivity by streamlining existing tasks.
“Given the kinds of customers Quilt is working with, we’re well-positioned to be the preferred AI partner for solutions teams,” Chen said.
Covariant is building ChatGPT for robots The UC Berkeley spinout says its new AI platform can help robots think more like peopleCovariant this week announced the launch of RFM-1 (Robotics Foundation Model 1).
“We at Covariant have already deployed lots of robots at warehouses with success.
“We do like a lot of the work that is happening in the more general purpose robot hardware space,” says Chen.
“ChatGPT for robots” isn’t a perfect analogy, but it’s a reasonable shorthand (especially in light of the founders’ connection to OpenAI).
Chen says the company expects the new RFM-1 platform will work with a “majority” of the hardware on which Covariant software is already deployed.
