The minority investor and registered investment advisor platform Elevation Point anticipates adding another $5 billion to its stable in 2026, co-founder and CEO Jim Dickson said on the sidelines of the Wealth Management EDGE conference at The Boca Raton resort in Boca Raton, Fla.
The Minneapolis-based self-styled “accelerator” for RIAs has already added $5 billion in new assets this year, and expects to roughly match that in the next six months, Dickson said in an interview with Founding Partner and President Brad Smithy. The firm has grown to $13.2 billion in assets since launching in mid-2024.
“The back half of the year is going to be very busy,” Dickson said. “Advisors are partnering with us because they want to double or triple the business. But when you look at our existing book, the average age of a head partner is about 45 years old, and usually a team of three or four … when you launch a business, you hope that’s your demographic, but when it becomes that, you get excited.”
The competition among other investors is fiercer than ever, Dickson said, including new minority investors that have entered the market even since the firm launched. Dickson said that when Elevation Point started, he told his partners they’d “have about 18 months” before there were similar movers, and it happened even faster.
“The barrier to entry is capital, and there’s more capital chasing this space than ever before,” Dickson said.
In May 2025, Elevation Point sold a minority stake to a long-term minority investor in the space, Emigrant Partners, which is Emigrant Bank’s RIA capital and advisory services arm. But to continue pursuing the goal of hitting $50 billion in the next two years, Dickson said the firm will seek an additional capital infusion.
“We’d be naïve not to say that we, at some point, might need more than just getting the office capital, which is what we’ve taken today,” Dickson said. “Emigrant has been wonderful, but we’re really careful about a couple of things. No. 1, we don’t want to give up control. … No. 2, we’re going to need a lot of capital, so we need to have a partner that can really be able to come with us and be able to grow with us.”
Citywire has previously reported that Elevation Point was in the market seeking an investor.
Not all new growth will come from adding firms, Dickson and Smith said.
They are at work on an artificial intelligence-backed wealth workstation they call Basecamp, designed to be customizable to a team’s specific book of business, reduce back-office work, and “save them two or three employees over time,” Dickson said.
“The client review agent will build the client review based on how they train it at the individual client level, instead of training it at the Elevation Point level or the Dynasty level or the Sanctuary level,” Dickson said, referring to competitor platforms, including the one he founded in Sanctuary Wealth.
Smithy said the firm has also been pleasantly surprised by how existing firms have been expanding wallet share with existing clients.
“What I didn’t estimate accurately was how many clients had money in multiple locations,” he said. “Maybe they didn’t like their original brand as much, but once they moved, there was a new brand, new independence and a new custodian.”
Earlier this year, Elevation Point took its eleventh minority stake in an Atlanta-based team managing $1.3 billion in assets before breaking away from UBS.
Other minority investors, however, have also been on the move. Joe Duran, the former CEO of United Capital, launched his minority RIA investor Growth Partners in early 2024, and has since taken stakes in four firms.
Last summer, 1099 hybrid RIA platform Concurrent Partners launched a minority investment program for external RIAs, with a few founding deals, after having a history of taking stakes in most of its partner firms.
This May, Accelerated Wealth Partners, founded by former Focus Financial Partners M&A lead Eric Amar, took its second minority stake in an RIA this year.