Q&A with Pluto Co-Founder and CEO Jacob Sansbury

What is your company in 2–5 words?

Scientific approach to retail investing.

Why is now the time for your company to exist?

Pluto aspires to level the playing field by giving all traders access to the same tools and market intelligence that have long been reserved for the few. Today’s market conditions can certainly feel frightening, especially for less-experienced investors. Our automated trading platform aims to help retail investors make data-informed investing decisions amid market volatility. The more investors can reduce emotional bias from decision-making, the better the long-term outcome will be.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

I have an incredibly talented team of day traders, engineers and business visionaries. My team is passionate about giving everyday people the resources they need to take control of their finances and thrive. We’re looking forward to growing our headcount, scaling our business, and reaching even more traders.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

I’d likely still be working as a software engineer. My role at Bridgewater sparked my passion for economics, as I was very fortunate to learn from the Bridgewater team. Having this access allowed me to deepen my understanding of the markets and formulate my own beliefs on how the economy moves. After a year and a half at Bridgewater, I decided to move to California and build my own business, and the rest is history.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your metrics?

Our vision is massive: to revolutionize the financial world. To execute on this, we need to stay agile while focusing on long-term and high-quality standards.

Pluto will be successful when we’ve changed the way people manage their money andthey reap the benefits of systematic decision-making. Our primary metric is the percentage of our clients making a profit or surpassing their benchmark. Currently, over 80% of our active portfolios meet this criteria.

In a few sentences, what do you offer to whom?

Pluto is a free-to-use investing platform that helps retail investors automate trading in stocks and cryptocurrencies by curating a portfolio of "strategies" or rules for when to buy and sell. We have tools for traders who want to develop their own strategies and a marketplace for traders who want to shop for existing user-developed strategies.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

It’s amazing to reflect on how much we’ve evolved over the past year. In 12 months, we grew our headcount from 2 to 10 and raised $4.2M in seed funding. On November 1, we launched our live trading platform to thousands of users.

Where do you think your growth will be next year?

We designed our business model to maximize the number of strategies that are profitable. Over the next year, we hope to grow our revenue and expand our team to make automated trading accessible to more people. We’re also looking to expand the number of assets available on the platform. In the long term, we want to disrupt the way that retail traders think about investing.

We have two main product goals for next year. The first is to release the strategy marketplace and supporting mobile experience. We’d also like to add support for trading US Equities (and possibly options).

Tell us about your first paying customer and revenue expectations over the next year.

Fees can make some strategies less profitable. Pluto differs from other brokerages or exchanges in that we charge a transparent and low fee on each order (8 cents + 10 BPS) instead of trading against our clients.

Pluto also provides detailed reports on the impact of fees during strategy building. In the future, we will explore an optional profit-driven fee structure to better align Pluto's success with our customers.