He Sold Companies To Box And Brex And Has Now Raised $105 Million To Build A Tech-Driven Platform Providing End-To-End Assistance To Solo Financial Advisors
What does it really take to build not just one—but multiple successful startups? For Ritik Malhotra, the answer isn’t just about intelligence, timing, or even luck; it’s about process, resilience, and an obsession with building.
From making money online as a kid to dropping out of UC Berkeley to facing 130+ investor rejections and building and exiting multiple companies, his journey is less about overnight success and more about compounding lessons over time.
The Early Spark: Falling in Love With Building
Ritik’s story starts in the Bay Area during the 90s—arguably one of the most formative environments for a future founder. Growing up in the 90s during the incredible explosion of technology, with a father in tech, he didn’t just observe innovation—he lived inside it.
But the real shift happened when Ritik discovered something powerful: You can build something on a computer—and someone will pay you for it. As a kid, he spent his time learning to build websites, launching small online businesses, and making real money (enough to help pay for college).
That inner curiosity about being able to do something with just your hands and mind was fascinating, seeing what the output could look like. That loop—build → launch → earn → repeat—became addictive. Not just because of the money, but because of the creative control and feedback loop.
From elementary school through middle school, Ritik had caught the entrepreneurship bug and started thinking about making it his full-time job. The experience of receiving money in his PayPal account from customers for his internet ventures was eye-opening.
Watching his work come to life was a powerful driver for Ritik, and he was convinced there was something there.
Dropping Out of Berkeley: Choosing the Builder Path
Ritik initially followed the expected route—studying Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley. But something didn’t feel right. He already knew that he could build and monetize startups. He simply enjoyed creating far more than studying.
Over the summer, Ritik had started a business with a few friends, which was less about technology. It was a tutoring business that taught classes on the weekends. It turned out to be very profitable and worked well. That’s when he learned about achieving product-market fit.
So Ritik made a decision that, at the time, wasn’t trendy—he dropped out. With acceptance into Y Combinator and the Thiel Fellowship, the signal was clear—there was a real path forward in startups.
Startup #1 (Streem): Learning Through Failure, Then Finding Product-Market Fit
The first company was born out of a personal pain point. Ritik had a hypothesis about a cloud storage problem. But like most first-time founders, his journey started with being completely wrong. Here’s how it played out.
Back then, a lot of data stored in cloud storage systems and products was accessible to most people, especially at larger enterprises, because the technology at the time synchronized files. Ritik and his cofounders developed an insight.
How about allowing access to the entire data corpus in an enterprise via a new streaming file system approach, rather than syncing files? This would be an entirely different technology—that insight became Streem. Streem was Ritik’s first experience with the full business lifecycle.
It was the first company he took to the finish line with Box's acquisition. The journey covered some of the most formative years in his life as a founder. Ritik looks back on the classic set of trials and tribulations that almost all entrepreneurs or founders have to go through.
Ritik and his cofounders got into the Y Combinator incubator program. Unfortunately, they were ideating and building something, but were also entirely wrong. The early days involved talking to customers constantly to understand what they were doing wrong.
The first look encompassed talking to customers, building the minimal product, testing it, gathering feedback, going back to the drawing board, and then iterating based on that feedback.
The Brutal Reality of Fundraising: 130+ Rejections
One of the defining moments of Ritik’s journey came during fundraising. Back in 2012, he was a 19-year-old first-time founder with no real experience, just some product feedback and traction. He was attempting to raise $750K for the company, which was a lot at the time.
Ritik went through 135 investor meetings and 120+ rejections. Most founders would have stopped, but as he points out, “You only need a few people to say yes in order to get the belief to actually get started.”
The rejections were a bitter lesson, but this is where a critical skill was built: the ability to process rejection systematically. Ritik would apply these lessons universally in several other situations throughout his journey—not just for fundraising, but for product building itself.
Instead of taking each “no” personally, Ritik developed the ability to reframe his mind, compartmentalize each of those conversations, learn from them, and put his best foot forward for the next one. That was the most important skill learned there.
Ritik’s takeaway—once you have that exposure, an understanding of the ins and outs, the psychology, the methodology, how systematic it is, and how to run the process of raising capital effectively—you can implement it down the line. And that’s what he did.
Core Lessons Learned: Building Is a System
What Ritik learned from this first journey is that having a process is actually one of the most important pieces. Founders should not be swayed away by just a string of no's. Instead, they should use each meeting to ask: "Is there anything I can implement for the next meeting?"
As Ritik underscores, “It’s just good hygiene in terms of what running a process looks like, because you're really trying to find the right investors that believe in you, believe in the vision, and are able to take the bet alongside you.”
Ritik is grateful for the fundraising process because it built the resiliency and grit required to bring a product to life. Without going through the motions, they would not have developed the final product and achieved a robust product-market fit.
Eventually, Streem was acquired by Box in 2014—a year before the IPO—for a rumored $20M to $30M, which is phenomenal for a first rodeo.
The Integration at Box
After selling the product and company to Box, Ritik and his teammates remained with the merged company for a few years. They assisted in integrating the software and growing the team. As he points out, the software is a core part of Box’s desktop product even today.
Ritik talks about the level of fulfillment he experienced watching the product in actual use, integrated as they had envisioned for enterprise customers. All their hypotheses came true at a much faster clip thanks to the assistance and scale Box provided.
This fulfillment helped fuel that inner desire to build something valuable. Ritik now had the experience of working at a larger corporation and felt ready to do it again.
A Taste of Investing
Between startups, Ritik tried investing because it seemed like the natural progression. But he realized something important: investing is not building. While intellectually stimulating, it lacked the emotional reward and gratification of creation. It clarified what he actually wanted—to build again.
The experience helped Ritik develop the perspective and understanding of the other side of the table. It helped him become more informed and learn crucial lessons that would help when executing Elph.
As Ritik sees it, investing in startups helps you graduate up the ladder—it’s a progression from building a startup and selling it. However, investing brought him a lot of clarity. During his limited time as an investor, he was exposed to multiple business models and different approaches.
Ritik developed the confidence to pursue his next venture in fintech as a first-time entrant, with no experience in finance or building fintech products. He had watched other founders systematically break down their fintech idea and its first principles.
Further, exposure to different business models changed Ritik’s perspective on them. When building Streem, he and his cofounders wanted to create a product they would use and pay for themselves. This is why they built it in a specific way—that addressed their personal pain points.
However, Ritik realized that this mindset limits a founder’s search space. Exposure to different types of businesses and business models fosters curiosity about other concepts that expands this search space.
Startup #2 (Elph): Applying the Same System in a New Industry
For his second company, Ritik intentionally chose something unfamiliar. The logical thing to do would have been to take lessons and newly observed behaviors from the first startup and acquisition and use them as insights for the second company.
However, Ritik wanted to explore a new concept that broadly centered on money and fintech. That concept became Elph—a ledger and accounting infrastructure for businesses handling internal money movement and currency such as banks and casinos.
This product resonated with most customers in the sector. The company scaled—and was acquired by Brex in 2019 for an amount rumored to be between $15M and $50M. At the time, Brex was raising its series C round.
The M&A Decision Framework: When Should You Sell?
Ritik has developed a practical framework for founders considering acquisition.
The Streem Acquisition
Talking about his first acquisition deal with Box, he stresses the science behind it. With Streem, they were building in the cloud storage space. The product clearly had value, and the cofounders were well aware of what differentiated it.
But by 2014, cloud storage as a category was at late-stage maturity. Users had been using Box and Dropbox for almost eight years by then. A number of other entrants were pouring money into the space.
To survive and reach the scale they needed, Ritik and his cofounders would need to raise $100M+ in a short timeframe just to compete. But by then, Streem’s competitors had scaled significantly, and pricing was based on storage scale.
When Ritik and his cofounders factored in these aspects, it seemed like a daunting proposition. They identified the calculus and realized the uphill battle in this very mature sector.
When Box made the acquisition offer, it made sense to accept it, de-risk the venture, and take some of the chips off the table. The cofounders were getting a win, and with the energy, they could build something in the future. They could also leverage their fundraising and recruiting track records.
This realization and personal gumption drove Ritik to accept Box’s offer.
The Elph Acquisition
With the second—the Elph acquisition—Ritik was faced with two pertinent questions:
Are you building something because you want to build it into a multi-billion-dollar independent business? · Is it something else intrinsic that you're seeking? Are you doing what you love and just want to sell to potential customers?
In some cases, you can accept an acquisition offer because the deal can accelerate the underlying mission to build the product and serve target customers in lieu of building independently—that’s a completely acceptable tradeoff, if that fits your personal goals.
Startup #3 (Savvy Wealth): Building an Enduring Company
Savvy Wealth wasn’t an overnight idea. It was the result of 6 years of curiosity and exploration. Ritik specifies that this startup is not for the faint of heart. He considers it his third and last venture, which means he intends to pour every ounce of energy into building it to be an enduring company.
Ritik fully intends to take Savvy Wealth public one day. The concept behind the company is to build an AI-native platform for independent financial advisors to run and grow their businesses.
After his first exit, Ritik became a client of financial advisors. He had the best problem in the world. He went from being a broke college dropout to having life-changing money after selling the company to Box and seeing it go public in 2015.
Over the 6 years after, Ritik had spent time diving deeper and deeper into the industry. He had spoken to 100+ financial advisors and learned about their pain points. He discovered that advisors were overwhelmed by middle- and back-office work.
The technology was outdated, and most lacked the tools to scale effectively, operate the business, and provide the best service to their clients. Advisors actually spent more time in the back offices than they did with clients. All these factors added up.
Ritik asked: Why hasn’t anyone fixed this? He recalls spending time learning more and more about the intricacies of building that kind of business. Eventually, he became a part-time advisor to friends and family.
Ritik loved the space, giving advice and lectures on personal finance to college-aged students. He spent as much of his brainpower thinking about the problem and just wondering why no one had solved it.
The Big Idea: AI for Financial Advisors
Savvy Wealth was built to answer Ritik’s question: Why had no one come up with a solution to help independent financial advisors, given that they are such a helpful and a valuable part of the American economy?
Ritik has this inner desire to think about his first two companies and the great financial exits at the end. He was ready to scratch the itch of building something that would have an enduring impact.
Ritik was confident that this was a meaningful opportunity for a very large industry that needed technology and could benefit from it.
Ultimately, he built a business that was sold to Brex and scaled into a corporate banking and wealth management business, which opened his eyes to how technology could help automate the middle- and back-office parts of a wealth management business.
The Savvy Wealth Business Model
Savvy Wealth’s real innovation is in the model. It makes money through the assets themselves. Ritik and his team realized early on that financial advisors did not want to purchase yet another piece of automation or AI software that could be plugged into their workflows.
Savvy Wealth is a fully vertically integrated platform that helps advisors from a licensing and regulatory perspective to their operations. The platform handles all middle- and back-office tasks, end-to-end and top-to-bottom.
As Ritik explains, assets are managed in the Savvy Wealth system, which shares in the fees the financial advisors charge their clients. He underscores that this is not a SaaS business model.
It is a business-in-a-box product with incentive alignment. If the platform helps the advisor make more money, it helps the platform's bottom line too.
Team Building: The Hardest and Most Important Lever
Ritik explains that they have been very mindful about recruiting and the talent they are onboarding. Having learned lessons from Streem, Elph, and Brex’s rapid scaling, he was determined to hire the best people. He recruited only the right cultural fits. Ultimately, teams are everything, he stresses.
The key shift: Saying “no” to candidates is as important as saying “yes.” In the initial days, given the tasks they needed to complete quickly, Ritik could have hired people quickly. Instead, he set the bar high and was patient.
Instead of hiring fast, Ritik waited for exceptional talent—finding the best person who is actually worth it. He focused on proven operators and prioritized cultural alignment. As two examples, Savvy’s CTO was the first CTO at Carta, helping scale the company from seed to Series D; Savvy’s CRO was the first VP Sales at Compass, helping scale it to a multi-billion dollar enterprise.
As Ritik explains, these individuals have a very strong track record of building iconic companies from near-inception to hundreds of millions in recurring revenue.
When interacting with these people, Ritik found himself learning and soaking in so much information. That’s when he decided these were the people he wanted to be surrounded by. He has excellent chemistry with them and enjoys working together.
$105M Raised: Fundraising With Experience and the Vision Ahead
Ritik reveals that they have raised $105M in funding for Savvy Wealth. Their mission is to make great financial advice easier to deliver.
Storytelling is everything that Ritik was able to master. The key is capturing the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley legend (<a href=" target="blank" rel="noopener">see it here</a>), where the most critical slides are highlighted.
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If the platform succeeds, Ritik and his team will have built the full end-to-end operating system for an independent financial advisor to operate their business.
It will be a business-in-a-box with access to the financial products and services advisors need to deliver a really compelling experience to their clients. These services will include portfolio management, financial planning, taxes, estate planning, banking, alternatives, and more.
Advisors can focus directly on the client and trust that Savvy, behind them, provides the infrastructure they can rely on for all of those elements. Savvy is fully vertically integrated end-to-end, from collecting paperwork and onboarding to the actual bare metal, via the underlying custody of assets.
It integrates into the brokerage and can manage them directly, offering a full suite of services to help independent advisors compete against the large banks. The idea is to help the advisor with anything related to money for their end client.
Savvy is just betting on the advisor being there. It is about building all these tools and technologies to automate tasks for the advisor—that is how Ritik’s vision plays out.
Savvy is like a superpower suit for advisors that ultimately helps them deliver great financial advice in the best and easiest way, which then helps the maximum number of clients maximize their outcomes—that's the way that the industry works.
The Most Important Lesson: You Don’t Get Extra Points for Doing It Alone
If Ritik could go back and give his younger self one piece of advice he learned from Brex’s co-founder: “You get no extra points for doing things yourself, so you might as well get all the help you can.”
Early on, he believed he had to figure everything out and do everything independently. But, ultimately, no one is keeping track of who did what—only what was built.
“Success has many authors. You're better served trying to find people to co-author the thing that you put out,” Ritik says.
Final Thought
Ritik’s journey isn’t about luck or timing; it’s about mastering a simple loop: Build → Test → Learn → Repeat. Do it long enough—and eventually you don’t just build companies; you build conviction.
Rejection is data—130+ “no’s” refined the system that ultimately led to success. · Building great companies is a repeatable loop: build, test, learn, iterate. · Product-market fit isn’t found—it’s earned through constant customer feedback. · Market reality should guide decisions—sometimes selling is smarter than scaling. · Exposure to different business models expands how founders see opportunity. · The best companies are built by exceptional teams, not individual effort. · Enduring businesses come from deep conviction built over years of curiosity.
Original Version
Alejandro Cremades: All righty, hello everyone and welcome to the DealMaker Show. So today we have a founder that has done it three times now. He's on his third time. And the the last two, I mean, very successfully so too with the with quite the outcomes, with the exits.
Alejandro Cremades: ah We're going to be talking about the building, the scaling, the way to think about fundraising. What was his journey? Perhaps you know the first go at it you know versus how it is today, given the experience. Also, some of the inflection points and those specific days where things failed, like perhaps product market fit was hitting, turning around a corner, as well as the importance of team building or the intensity and the pace when building stuff.
Alejandro Cremades: so Brace yourself for a very inspiring conversation. And without further ado, let's welcome our guest today, Ritik Malhotra. Welcome up to the show.
Ritik Malhotra: Thanks for having me really excited for this.
Alejandro Cremades: So originally born in California, but you did the move quite a bit between California, India, then coming back to California. How was life growing up for you?
Ritik Malhotra: that's right. So initially born in California and, uh, what, what I realized, uh, was that it, uh, all roads lead back. Went to that went back to india India for a few years. My parents originally from from there, then they ended it back in the Bay area back when I was right about turning four.
Ritik Malhotra: So spent my entire life in California, just around the Bay Area, around technology. And I think that had a huge part to do with just falling in love with what technology can make possible.
Alejandro Cremades: So then walk us a little bit through as well, being there in the ninety s in California, growing up in the Bay Area, seeing the incredible explosion of innovation, your dad also being in tech.
Alejandro Cremades: You know, i'm sure that there's like getting those insights and experiencing that firsthand, perhaps build a little bit who you are today, the entrepreneurial drive to tell us about this.
Ritik Malhotra: Absolutely. So I think all of these things come together. I think a lot of this happens when you're younger. And, uh, as a kid, I just fell in love with, with computers and i used to spend every free moment, you know, after finishing school homework, playing with some friends and then coming back and spending all my time learning how i could make software on, uh, on a computer.
Ritik Malhotra: And this just inner curiosity of being able to do something with just your hands and and your mind was actually quite quite impressive in in the in seeing what that output could look like.
Ritik Malhotra: So putting that together, you know i i spent the first few years just learning how to make websites and putting things on the internet and ultimately ran a few internet businesses back when I was in elementary to middle school.
Ritik Malhotra: Great way to learn, but also caught the entrepreneurial bug, made enough money online to go help pay for college. And I had said at that time that, know, this is so cool and so just just fulfilling for the mind that if there's a way that I could do this going forward and and make this, you know my actual full-time job, wouldn't that be amazing?
Ritik Malhotra: And lo and behold, I went to... to UC Berkeley for college a few years later, and was studying the electrical engineering and computer science there. But ultimately ended up dropping out of school to say, actually, I want to go and build something and actually pursue that passion to to go build, which which then gets us into the startups.
Alejandro Cremades: So then talk to us, too, because, I mean, you've you've also quite a quite quite had the exposure to making money yourself. And, in fact, you use that to pay for college. I guess, you know, having that exposure to the Bay, to what was going on, obviously got you excited about what could be possible with building things yourself, you know, on the computer science you know a side of things, which is why you went to Berkeley. But walk us through your first exposure to making money yourself and and then going through college and and dropping out.
Ritik Malhotra: So in middle school, kind of doing those internet ventures, I think that was the first exposure. And there's something about just seeing the fact that you can build something and actually make some money and it ends up in, at the time it was a PayPal account, I think that had received the money from whatever customer I was selling to backend back for those internet ventures.
Ritik Malhotra: And I think that just That ability to see the work that you do come to life was actually such a powerful driver that I said, well, this there must be something here. So actually, even in even in college, before dropping out, i actually had, at over the summer, actually started ah a business with a few friends that was ah less technology and a lot more on just, it was just a tutoring business where we were teaching classes on the on the weekends Uh, very profitable, really kind of worked well.
Ritik Malhotra: And so there was this mind of just finding product market fit, whatever that product and whatever that market was, uh, to earn, uh, or earn, know, dollars was actually just this, this loop that i really, really enjoyed. Uh, and then finally kind of, you know, going to the, that first startup, I think, uh, the, the motivation was not, Hey, how do we just make something to make more money? The, the actual joy of building something was the thing that I was seeking.
Ritik Malhotra: And ultimately when we we dropped out of school, we'd applied in and very fortunate to get into Y Combinator, the Teal Fellowship program.
Ritik Malhotra: And those moments if it really helped solidify that there is a pathway forward. There's a level of funding. There's a level of community that can actually help make the startup happen.
Ritik Malhotra: So building that superpower suit for them ultimately helps them deliver great financial advice in the best and easiest way, which then helps the maximum number of clients. We think that’s the way the industry works.
Alejandro Cremades: So let’s say I put you into a time machine and bring you back to the moment where you are about to drop out from Berkeley. And let’s say you are right there with that younger Ritik who is coming out of school with a smile, thinking about a world where he’s going to be launching a company. And let’s say you’re able to stop that younger self and give that younger self one piece of advice right there.
Alejandro Cremades: What would that be and why, given what you know now about launching a business?
Ritik Malhotra: To that version of myself, I would try my hardest to instill this one thing that I had heard from the founder of Brex. I think the phrase was: you get no extra points for doing things yourself.
Ritik Malhotra: So you might as well get all the help that you can along the way. And I stand by that very deeply today because I was the exact opposite back then. I thought, you know, I need to do everything myself.
Ritik Malhotra: I need to figure things out and go heads down and learn all these things. And ultimately, no one is keeping track of that. No one keeps track of that scoreboard, but they do see what you’re able to build.
Ritik Malhotra: And I think in many things in life, but especially in company building, there is no such thing as being the sole author. You’re effectively trying to find people around you to co-author the thing that you put out.
Ritik Malhotra: And so being intentional about that, and telling that version of myself that it’s okay—you do not need to do everything yourself, and no one is keeping track of this—actually probably would have been the most impactful thing for me at that time.
Alejandro Cremades: So, Ritik, for the people that are listening and would love to reach out and say hi, what is the best way for them to do so?
Ritik Malhotra: I think you can reach me on LinkedIn. Ritik Malhotra is the name. Also feel free to shoot me an email: Ritik@SavvyWealth.com
Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well, easy enough. Well, Ritik, thank you so much for being on the DealMaker Show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us.
Ritik Malhotra: Thank you. This was a pleasure. I really enjoyed this.
