Flourish to Acquire Sora Finance
Flourish, a technology platform serving registered investment advisors, best known to date for its cash management features, has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the AI-powered liability analytics startup Sora Finance.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The combined firms would have the potential to provide a platform for advisors to address the management of both cash and debt and build out lending services to their clients.
“We’re adding a third leg to the stool,” said Flourish CEO Max Lane. In addition to its cash management platform, Flourish rolled out an annuities platform in January 2024. Now, with its intended acquisition of Sora, it will add that third leg of liability management services, which, according to both firms, particularly resonates with younger clients.
While there surely will be some overlap, Flourish currently works with over 900 advisory firms that manage an aggregate of $1.6 trillion in assets, including Focus Financial Partners and Ritholtz Wealth. The Flourish Cash platform currently supports more than $7 billion in assets under custody.
Sora works with 750 firms that have $3 billion in what it refers to as liabilities under management.
Specifically, Sora is meant to help financial advisors visualize, analyze and optimize their clients’ loans across mortgages, HELOCs, student loans and credit cards. It alerts advisors on opportunities for clients to save money or refinance loans based on AI-driven insights and data from a network of lenders.
According to the firms, Sora will continue to operate as a standalone business while the two companies integrate their technology, which is expected in early 2026.
Currently, Flourish has in-depth integrations with several popular CRM, financial planning, and performance reporting providers, including Salesforce and overlays like XLR8, as well as eMoney, Practifi, RightCapital, Redtail, SS&C Salentica and Wealthbox. On the performance reporting and analytics side, it has integrations with Addepar, Envestnet | Tamarac, Orion and SS&C Black Diamond.
“You think about advisor workstations and them [advisors] not wanting to have to hop around to different tools—you can kick off a Flourish invite directly from Salesforce, directly from eMoney, that’s really a step into a big theme of ours, which is, how do we help advisors move from just holistic advice into holistic implementation,” Lane said.
This drive toward an ever-more holistic approach requires a true picture not just of assets and cash inflows and outflows but also of client liabilities. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, household debt has risen to astronomical proportions—$18 trillion in the United States.
That figure includes all forms of borrowing, mortgages, credit card balances, auto loans, student loans and other forms of consumer debt.
The acquisition of Sora is meant to address that need.
“Whether it’s paying for the kids’ college or you’re going to renovate your kitchen, we look at what’s the best solution, ‘Is it a securities-backed line of credit? Is it a home equity line of credit? Is it selling assets, or is it using cash?’ And we try to run the impact, so the advisor is there front and center on what’s your best recommendation,” said Sora co-founder and co-CEO, Rohit Agarwal.
While Sora currently has full integration with Wealthbox and is in the process of building out another with Redtail, Agarwal touted the potential of Sora’s integrations with the rest of the Flourish ecosystem of providers.
He said that two immediate use cases where Sora can be of great immediate value to advisors are client onboarding and the ability to quickly show advisors all their clients’ existing loans or outstanding liabilities.
“The second one we think about is the recommendation engine—how do we show up where an advisor logs in and looks at their three to five to-do list items and be able to immediately see that, ‘Hey, this client may be ready for a refinance, or this client based on their age and their income, they’re probably looking for a home,’” said Agarwal, noting that integrations with planning applications RightCapital and eMoney held exciting potential.
Longtime industry analyst William Trout recognized the potential in the deal and its positive results for Sora and its team, which has grown to 10 employees (Flourish, for comparison, now stands at right around 100).
“Sora launched at a very hard time in terms of interest rates, and this deal is a validation of their hard work and progress, despite the many challenges,” wrote Trout, director of the securities and investments practice at Datos Insights, in an email.
“For Flourish, the acquisition adds another arrow to their quiver of services,” he wrote.
Sora Finance and Flourish each won a 2024 WealthManagement.com Industry Award in the technology provider category for Liability Data Aggregation and Flourish Cash product offerings, respectively.
Flourish is wholly owned by Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company, which acquired it in January 2021.
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