Who owns Betterment? Ownership structure explained (2026)

Betterment is one of the original robo-advisors. When it launched to the public in 2010, the idea that software could build and manage a diversified portfolio for a fraction of a human advisor's fee was still novel. Fifteen years later, automated investing is mainstream, and Betterment sits near the top of the independent field it helped create.

Ownership of a company like Betterment matters because it is not a bank, a brokerage giant, or a public company answerable to quarterly earnings. It is a private, venture-backed business that has raised money for well over a decade without an exit. Understanding who holds the equity, who sits on the board, and how much capital has gone in explains both the pressure the company is under and the freedom it still has.

This article breaks down who owns Betterment: its founders, its outside investors, the people in control today, and the events that shaped its cap table.

Betterment was founded in 2008 in New York City by Jon Stein and Eli Broverman. Stein, a former financial consultant, wanted to strip the friction and cost out of everyday investing. Broverman, a securities lawyer, handled the regulatory groundwork of launching a registered investment adviser. The company debuted its consumer product at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in 2010.

The core business is automated investing. Betterment builds diversified portfolios of low-cost exchange-traded funds, then manages them with automatic rebalancing, tax-loss harvesting, and goal-based planning. It charges a recurring fee rather than trading commissions. Over time it has widened into cash management, retirement accounts, a 401(k) business for employers, and a platform serving independent financial advisors.

Betterment is private. Its most recent priced valuation was roughly $1.3 billion, set during a 2021 funding round. The company reported around $215 million in revenue for 2024 and said it manages more than $70 billion in assets for over one million customers as of 2026. Those figures make it one of the largest independent robo-advisors, competing with rivals such as Wealthfront and Acorns.

Betterment is a privately held company. It has never completed an initial public offering, and it has no parent company or majority corporate owner. Equity is split among the founders, current and former employees who hold stock or options, and the venture capital, growth equity, and corporate investors that have funded the business since 2010. Because it is private, Betterment does not publish a shareholder register, so exact ownership percentages are not disclosed.

Founders Jon Stein and Eli Broverman retained meaningful stakes through the early rounds, but the specific size of their holdings today is not public. Broverman left his operating role at the company in 2016, though he remained involved as an investor and adviser. Stein led the company as CEO until late 2020 and continues to chair the board, which typically signals a significant remaining equity position. As with most companies that raise this much venture capital over more than a decade, founder ownership has been diluted round by round. Betterment has not confirmed current founder percentages, so any precise figure would be an estimate rather than a fact.

Betterment has raised money steadily since 2010. The table below summarizes its main priced equity rounds. Amounts and lead investors are drawn from contemporaneous reporting; some early figures vary slightly by source.

Betterment has raised roughly $435 million in equity across about 11 rounds in total. In 2022, existing investor Kinnevik added a follow-on investment, and it later marked down the carrying value of its stake, implying a valuation below the 2021 peak.

Kinnevik, a Swedish listed investment company, is one of Betterment's largest outside shareholders. It led the 2016 Series E and has continued to back the company, giving it one of the more visible stakes on the cap table because Kinnevik reports the position in its own public filings.

Bessemer Venture Partners was the earliest institutional backer, leading the 2010 Series A and participating in later rounds. Menlo Ventures led the 2012 Series B and stayed in through subsequent rounds. Francisco Partners, a technology-focused growth and buyout firm, led the 2015 Series D. Anthemis Group, a fintech specialist, invested from the earliest days. Corporate and strategic investors include Citi Ventures and insurer Aflac. The 2021 round drew a wider group of participants, including Treasury as the equity lead.

Betterment has been described for years as a plausible IPO candidate, but it has not filed to go public. Its long private history, its recurring revenue, and its scale all fit the profile of a company that could list, yet management has not committed to a timeline. For now, liquidity for early shareholders comes from secondary sales rather than a public offering.

Sarah Levy is the CEO. She joined Betterment in late 2020 and took over from Jon Stein at the start of 2021. Levy spent more than two decades at Viacom, most recently as chief operating officer of its media networks, before moving into fintech. She was hired to scale the company operationally and steer it toward profitability and a possible public listing.

Jon Stein, the co-founder and first CEO, is chairman of the board. His move from operator to chairman in 2020 was a deliberate handoff to a professional management team while he retained board influence and, presumably, a large equity stake. Co-founder Eli Broverman stepped away from day-to-day operations in 2016.

The board includes representatives of major investors alongside the founders. Firms with the largest stakes, such as Kinnevik and the lead investors from later rounds, generally hold or influence board seats, which is standard for a venture-backed company at this stage. Betterment does not publish a full board roster, so the precise composition is not fully confirmed in public sources.

In April 2023, Betterment agreed to pay a $9 million penalty to settle charges from the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The regulator found that, between 2016 and 2019, Betterment made material misstatements and omissions about its automated tax-loss harvesting service. The issues included failing to disclose a change in how often the software scanned accounts, a programming constraint affecting some clients, and coding errors that stopped losses from being harvested for certain accounts. The SEC said the problems touched more than 25,000 client accounts and cost affected clients an estimated $4 million in lost tax benefits. Betterment settled without admitting or denying the findings, and the penalty was distributed to affected clients. The case is notable because tax-loss harvesting is one of the core features robo-advisors use to justify their fees.

Betterment operates as a registered investment adviser and a broker-dealer, which places it under ongoing SEC and FINRA oversight. Its automated model means a single software error can affect thousands of accounts at once, as the 2023 settlement showed. This concentration of risk is a structural feature of the robo-advisor business rather than a one-off event, and it shapes how the company discloses and manages its algorithms.

Betterment charges a low recurring fee, and the entire category faces pricing pressure from large incumbents. Charles Schwab, Vanguard, and Fidelity all offer automated portfolios, sometimes at no advisory fee, using their scale to subsidize the product. In January 2026, Betterment moved its entry-level digital plan to a $5 monthly flat fee for smaller balances, a change that drew mixed reactions from customers. Sustaining margins against far larger and better-capitalized rivals is a persistent strategic challenge.

Betterment's private, venture-backed structure gives it both freedom and pressure. Because it is not public, management can invest in long-term bets such as its advisor platform and 401(k) business without answering to quarterly earnings calls. That has let the company expand well beyond its original consumer robo-advisor and build several revenue lines that take years to mature.

The flip side is the clock that venture capital runs on. Investors who put money in as far back as 2010 want a return, and the main paths to one are an IPO or an acquisition. That expectation helps explain the 2020 decision to bring in an operationally seasoned CEO in Sarah Levy, and the steady drumbeat of speculation about a future listing. A valuation that some investors have marked down since 2021 raises the stakes: the company needs to grow into and past its last priced figure to reward long-standing shareholders.

Ownership also shapes strategy through acquisitions. Betterment has repeatedly bought books of business from competitors and larger institutions, including Wealthsimple's US accounts, Goldman Sachs's Marcus Invest customers, and Ellevest's automated investing arm. Buying assets under management is a fast way to add scale in a business where scale drives profitability, and a well-funded private balance sheet makes those deals possible.

For customers, the ownership structure is mostly reassuring but worth understanding. Their assets are held in their own accounts at custodians, not on Betterment's balance sheet, so the company's funding situation does not put client money at direct risk. But the pressure to reach profitability influences pricing, as the 2026 fee change illustrated. That trade-off between investor returns and customer costs is the throughline in how a private robo-advisor is run, and it is visible across the fintech sector, from SoFi to commission-free brokers like Robinhood.

Sarah Levy is the CEO of Betterment. She joined in late 2020 and took over the role in early 2021, succeeding co-founder Jon Stein. Before Betterment, she spent more than 20 years at Viacom, including as chief operating officer of its media networks.

No. Betterment is a private company and does not trade on any stock exchange. It has never completed an IPO, and there is no publicly available stock. Shares are held by founders, employees, and private investors.

Betterment was founded in 2008 by Jon Stein and Eli Broverman in New York City. Stein served as CEO until 2020 and is now chairman. Broverman stepped back from operations in 2016.

Betterment's largest outside shareholders include the Swedish investment company Kinnevik, along with venture and growth investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, and Francisco Partners. Founder Jon Stein is also believed to hold a significant stake. Exact ownership percentages are not disclosed because the company is private.

Betterment has raised roughly $435 million in equity across about 11 funding rounds since 2010. Its most recent priced round was a $160 million Series F in 2021, which included $60 million in equity and a $100 million credit line, and valued the company at about $1.3 billion. That valuation has since been marked down by some investors. To put a private valuation like this in context, you can experiment with a business valuation calculator.