AI-Business Automation Leader CogniCor Expands Advisory Board and Attracts New Investors

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Jun 07, 2022, 06:00 ET

Fintech Entrepreneur Toan Huynh joins Kestra's Stephen Langlois, Former Northwestern Mutual CIO Karl Gouverneur and SixThirty Ventures' Atul Kamra on Advisory Board to Focus on Business Operations and Product Development

Innovator and Technologist Ramaswamy Nagappan, Chief Information Officer for BNY Mellon, Joins the Latest Funding Round of Next Generation AI-Platform for Financial Advisors

PALO ALTO, Calif., June 7, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- CogniCor, the Morgan Stanley-backed provider of artificial intelligence-powered business automation and learning platforms for highly regulated industries, today announced it named fintech entrepreneur Toan Huynh to its Advisory Board and technology innovator Ramaswamy Nagappan, Chief Information Officer for BNY Mellon Pershing LLC, personally joined the company's SAFE Investment round.

CogniCor's AI-enabled front and back-office automation platform currently enables Fortune 500 financial firms to augment financial advisors' productivity and redirect valuable employee resources to focus on growth strategies, relieving pressure from traditional staffing models. The company also recently received an investment from Morgan Stanley and was selected for acceleration by its multicultural innovation lab.

"We're facing an unprecedented shift in financial advisor's operations and back-office support structures during the largest wealth transfer in history," said Sindhu Joseph, Ph.D., CogniCor's co-founder and CEO. "I am convinced that the support of our esteemed advisor board members along with Ram's guidance will enable CogniCor to continue its strategic expansion and targeted product development to help wealth management and insurance industries thrive."

New Advisory Board member

Ms. Huynh has served as an investor and advisor for early-stage startups, focusing on B2B SaaS, fintechs and insurtechs, with experience in private equity and venture capital funds. She serves as a non-executive director for private and public boards. Ms. Huynh is a founding mentor for Declare, which looks to close the gender and diversity gap in finance, venture and technology. Prior to her venture and investing career, Ms. Huynh was a cloud technologist and founder and CEO of GlobalOne/Cloud Sherpas (Acquired by Accenture).

Ms. Huynh said: "I am excited to work with Sindhu and CogniCor's executive and advisory leadership at this pivotal moment in this industry's history. The last few years exposed significant shortcomings to the traditional staffing model and CogniCor stands apart in this space for its ability to address these pressing issues through best-in-class technology."

CogniCor's Advisory Board also includes:

Stephen Langlois, President of Kestra Financial, a Texas-based independent wealth management platform. He has previously served as Chief Revenue Officer and Head of Business Development for Fidelity-backed financial planning software company eMoney.
Karl Gouverneur,Former Chief Innovation Officer and head of Digital Innovation of Northwestern Mutual has significant experience supporting technology start-ups across a range of industries as an executive, coach, advisor and board member.
Atul Kamra, Managing Partner of SixThirty. Previously, he served as Head of Advice with Wells Fargo Advisors and President of First Clearing.
Professor Ramon Lopez de Mantaras, Former director of Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IIIA-CSIC), Spain. Professor Lopez de Mantaras is an international leader of AI research.

Nagappan Invests in SAFE Round

Technology and wealth management veteran Ramaswamy Nagappan personally invested in CogniCor as part of a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE). Currently the Chief Information Officer for BNY Mellon Pershing LLC, Mr. Nagappan has served in numerous positions over the past 40 years including as managing director and CTO for iNautix Technologies, a managing director for DLJ Direct and as a serial entrepreneur and investor in the New York City area.

"I'm impressed with CogniCor's unique value proposition of tapping into AI to create efficiencies in advisory and custodian relationships. The firm's ability to leverage reusable knowledge graphs and develop specific use cases for this technology can address broken experiences across the financial services industry," said Mr. Nagappan, who oversees BNY Mellon Pershing's NetX360, the largest custodian platform.

Dr. Joseph concluded, "Bringing aboard, widely recognized and successful experts to our advisory board and larger investor team enables CogniCor to refine and execute on our vision for leveraging our cutting-edge AI-solutions to transform financial services."

About CogniCor

CogniCor is a venture-funded, female-founded fintech firm based in Palo Alto, California that is focused on using artificial intelligence solutions to accelerate productivity and growth for wealth management firms, insurance businesses and other financial services companies across the country. Central to the firm's offerings is CIRA, CogniCor's scalable enterprise platform for deploying and managing AI-powered business automation to help wealth management and financial services firms drive client engagement and business efficiency. For more information, please visit https://www.cognicor.com/.

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SOURCE CogniCor