Charleston startup Advisor.com raises $9M for growth

Originally from Boston, Hunter Stunzi came to Charleston in 2002 looking for his shot at the Olympics through the College of Charleston sailing team.  

After falling only one point short of going to the 2008 Olympics in China, Stunzi said Charleston was still the place he wanted to land and began working as a bellhop at Wentworth Mansion amidst a challenging job market. 

A couple years after his 2007 college graduation, Stunzi launched his first company, Snapcap, a marketing technology company. The business was later acquired by LendingTree and after three years, Stunzi left to pursue a new venture.  

“As I was leaving LendingTree, I’d had some success, and I enjoyed this start-up business thing. I was pondering a move to New York City, but COVID fixed that.” Stunzi said. “I ended up saying, ‘You know what? I want to go build more great businesses in Charleston.’ With my access to capital and my early win as an entrepreneur, I was able to raise some capital in late 2021.” 

Motivated for a new journey, Stunzi launched Advisor.com in 2022, a wealth management service targeting young adults. He collected some funds from investors along with investing in the company himself and began Advisor.com standards atypical of most wealth management companies.  

For Stunzi, the focus is on clients in their late 20s and early 30s who are high earners but not rich yet, or a “Henry,” as he says. The Henrys typically have good incomes but don’t have the funds to put a down payment on a house with an 8% mortgage rate, they are looking into child care and have other financial struggles that accumulate over time, Stunzi said.  

“It’s sort of a David and Goliath story that we’re trying to tell here. We charge a flat fixed fee to all of our clients and because of that, we’re agnostic to the assets that you bring into the relationship,” Stunzi said. 

Traditionally, financial advisers take a small percentage of the income each client makes, but Stunzi was determined to create a fixed $3,750 standard fee for a variety of clients. The average client has about a $150,000 income who are often software and tech workers in their 30s. 

Advisor.com provides services for investment management, financial planning and filing taxes in in all 50 states. The team is made up of about 12 advisers across the Lowcountry, Nashville, Charlotte and Honolulu, Stunzi said. 

“This town has plenty of hospitality folks and restaurateurs and lawyers and doctors,” Stunzi said. “But there is sort of a gray area and so you quickly need to become an entrepreneur.” 

In September, Advisor.com landed a successful seed round led by Walkabout Ventures, with participation from Long Ridge Private Equity Partners Founder and Managing Partner Jim Brown.  

Through the partnership with the Los Angeles brand, Stunzi and his team were able to collect $9 million in investment toward Advisor.com.  

Locally, Stunzi found acquiring investors for his company to be more of a struggle than expected. A lot of local investors focus on logistics and health, with very little opportunity for wealth tech investment, he said.  

“I don’t think being in Charleston is great for being a new entrepreneur. But when you get to a level where you have some momentum, which I think I now have my career, I’m benefiting from the transformation here in this town,” Stunzi said. “I am beginning to see a bigger opportunity to put this place on the map along with many others and Charleston’s becoming much more investable.” 

What makes Stunzi’s company stand apart from many others is an artificial intelligence registered investment adviser system that matches clients with an adviser that best meets their needs.  

Large companies such as Vanguard and Ameriprise, among others, are customers of Advisor.com through the RIA system. AI matches clients with Advisor.com if they meet the requirements, but if they have needs that a different company specializes in, the system will direct them to one of the other wealth management companies.  

Recently, Advisor.com partnered with “Wall Street Journal’s” commerce site, WSJ Buy Side, which writes reviews and recommendations for financial products and services. 

Stunzi said one of his missions as he continues to grow Advisor.com is to be able to say the company was built out of Charleston. 

“This category of business that I’m doing would never have been done this way 10 years ago because every wealth management practice had everybody in a 50-mile radius because people will only work with a financial adviser that they can go sit down with,” Stunzi said. “We have clients that will likely never ever meet in person, yet they trust us with hundreds of thousands and, in some case, millions of their dollars. Which is just an incredible example of this technology and action.”