Sure the latest initiatives from the Teslas, Apples and Googles of the industry tend to dominate the tech news space — and with good reason. Still, the tech titans aren’t the only ones bringing innovation to the sector.
In an effort to highlight up-and-coming tech companies, Built In launched The Future 5 across seven major U.S. tech hubs. Each quarter, we will feature five early-stage tech companies, nonprofits or entrepreneurs in each of these hubs who just might be working on the next big thing. Read our round-up of LA’s rising startups from last quarter here.
* * *
While the cryptocurrency craze may have cooled down in recent months, the digital asset space is still home to highly lucrative investment opportunities. However, investors looking to take advantage of these various opportunities often encounter challenges that modern tech can help solve. Pluto developed a platform that helps investors create tools that diversify their digital investments and manage risk, regardless of their technical expertise.
Created with Gen Z users in mind, Pluto wants to facilitate the next generation of quantitative retail investing. The platform offers a marketplace of digital investment strategies that can be suited to users’ specific preferences without needing to create new code. This comprehensive menu of prefabricated algorithm inputs lets investors build and use their own trading strategies.
These strategies augment investors’ existing capabilities in their digital asset or equity market portfolios. Pluto’s tech makes the most of favorable market conditions while protecting portfolios from risk, according to the company.
Pluto is for anyone who wants to compete with institutional investing behemoths but lacks the resources to do so.”
The free portfolio management platform is designed to be accessible to people of all experience levels. Pluto offers a user-friendly interface and step-by-step informational tools to help users leverage its solution.
Additionally, Pluto members can license the strategies they build to other people in the Pluto community and profit from their knowledge. With about 6,000 people on its platform today, Pluto has been growing at a rate of about 10 percent each month, according to Jacob Sansbury, Pluto’s CEO and co-founder.
“Pluto’s proprietary strategy grading system and marketplace give investors the option to educate themselves on a plethora of strategy options and select the one most appropriate for their risk tolerance and investment preferences,” Sansbury told Built In via email. “Pluto is for anyone who wants to compete with institutional investing behemoths but lacks the resources to do so.”
Users who join Pluto’s platform can also reap a number of rewards. The platform offers a Community Rewards program that allocates a portion of Pluto’s profits back to its investor community. Additionally, the company’s Sparks initiative rewards users for completing educational missions and learning more about the wealth creation systems professionals use.
Geared toward novice investors, Pluto was born from the mind of a young entrepreneur. Sansbury picked up coding at a very young age, having learned basic functions from his father. Not long after, he started his full-time career in software engineering as a teenager. By the time he was 18, Sansbury dropped out of high school and began working at Bridgewater Associates, a Connecticut-based investment management company.
Having gathered market insights and developed personal beliefs as to how the economy moves, Sansbury decided to build a solution of his own to address these areas. He moved to the West Coast to lay the groundwork for Pluto less than two years after starting his job at Bridgewater.
Alongside co-founder Dakota McDaniels, Sansbury launched Pluto in 2021. Its current offering includes strategies for live crypto trading. This capability enables investors to trade a number of digital currencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polygon and Dogecoin with lower fees than bigger exchanges and trading platforms, according to Pluto. So far, the majority of the test strategies built on Pluto reflect a positive net return, the company said in a November release.
Pluto’s goal is to become a hub for multi-asset trading. As it continues its work helping investors achieve maximum portfolio growth potential, Pluto plans to include stock trading features on its platform. In the near future, the company will offer stock report cards to help users gain better insight into leveraging Pluto’s solution for investment strategies, Sansbury said.
