In 2022 UBS agreed to buy Wealthfront for $1.4 billion, then walked away. Three years later Wealthfront went public on its own. The company had started as kaChing, a stock-picking site, before deciding software should manage money instead of people. It built automated portfolios, then a high-yield cash account that pulled in deposits when rates rose. By mid-2025 it held about $88 billion in platform assets. It filed for its IPO in late 2025.

Leaving kaChing Behind

Andy Rachleff, a co-founder of the venture firm Benchmark, started the company with Dan Carroll in 2008. The first product, kaChing, was a stock-picking website. It turned into Wealthfront, which built low-fee index portfolios for people who did not want to pick stocks. Software rebalanced accounts and harvested tax losses automatically. Later came direct indexing, college savings plans, stock investing, and the cash account.

Fourteen Dollars a Share

Wealthfront priced its IPO at $14 a share on December 11, 2025, and listed on Nasdaq as WLTH. It raised about $485 million at a fully diluted value near $2.6 billion. David Fortunato, its longtime technology chief, led the company as CEO, with Rachleff as chairman. In 2026 the board approved share buybacks and expanded them in October. Wealthfront still trades on Nasdaq as WLTH.

Cover: Summer (Peasants Harvesting Wheat), from The Four Seasons, Jan Saenredam. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for harvesting wheat (wealth that compounds).