Zocks is a privacy-first AI platform for financial advisors that analyzes conversations with clients to capture key information and integrates with key business and records systems to accelerate workflows. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Zocks co-founder and CEO, Mark Gilbert, to learn more about the company.
Mark Gilbert’s Background
What is Mark Gilbert’s background? Gilbert said:
“I am the Co-Founder & CEO of Zocks. Prior to Zocks, I served in a variety of executive and product leadership roles at Twilio, Hearsay Systems and Microsoft. I have a long history of building high-growth enterprise software businesses. I am a recognized industry expert in Enterprise Platforms, Communications, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Mobile Technologies. I received my Bachelor of Applied Science (B.A.Sc.) with a focus in Electrical Engineering from University of Waterloo.”
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea for the company come together? Gilbert shared:
“From our experience, we saw a failure of traditional advisor technology to deliver on its promises, and an industry that has traditionally struggled to adopt new technologies because of compliance and security needs. Despite a decade of investments in digital tools, advisors still have a crushing administrative burden. We looked at using new AI systems and mixing them with communications to help advisors with their client conversations, and then accelerate tasks rather than take them off the advisor’s plate.”
“We built a platform that lets us use AI in highly private, security and compliant situations. That has grown into a platform that really automates critical processes, like meeting prep, note-taking, filling out forms and workflows, replying to client emails, and many more workflows, and we’ve only just started.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Gilbert reflected:
“There are a number of favorites, but when we on-boarded our first early adopter user, he uploaded a meeting for us to analyze. We looked at the results and I saw a few formatting errors. He smiled with this huge grin and said, ‘This just saved me an hour from this single meeting, Mark.’ I asked about the formatting issues, and he said ‘Don’t worry, this is still so much faster than what I’m doing today.’ It made my week, I was so worried about the product look and feel, and it made my day (for many days).”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Gilbert explained:
“Key features include:
— Automated Meeting Preparation & Scheduling
— Live Meeting Notes Capture (Virtual, In-Person, Phone)
— Action Item Creation & CRM Sync
— Drafting Personalized Follow-up Emails
— Client Profiles & Intelligence Over Time
— “Ask Anything” AI Agent for data retrieval
— Integrations (CRM, Email, Calendar, VOIP)
— No Recording Required”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Gilbert and the team faced in building the company? Gilbert acknowledged:
“Yes, everyday! Starting and building any company is always challenging, and we’ve been lucky with great investors and a number of leaders that we’ve worked with before, which helps a lot. But we still hit challenges all of the time. Our biggest one is making large firms that are naturally risk averse comfortable with AI. It’s a new and very fast moving area, and firms want to learn, but it’s a new world for them. We walk them through all of the controls and policies we have in the platform, how other large firms who work with us operate, and spend time discussing how the technologies work and the main considerations for privacy and compliance.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Gilbert noted:
“Originally launched as a powerful meeting note tool, Zocks has evolved into a full-scale client intelligence platform. Platform enhancements include:
— Support for multi-party speaker identification
— Enterprise dashboards and organizational controls
— Integration with tools like Salesforce, Practifi, and Wealthbox
— Email AI Agents and custom form-fill workflows
— A new elastic integration layer for custom CRM configurations”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Gilbert cited:
“We launched just over a year ago and are one of the fastest growing startups in the fintech space, tripling in revenue in the last five months.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Gilbert about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“We deployed with Carson Financial Group across their RIAs in under six weeks, which is the fastest enterprise software deployment they’ve seen. This is similar feedback we’ve gotten from other large organizations, like RFG, as they stay on the leading edge of technology for their advisors.”
Funding/Revenue
When asking Gilbert about the company’s funding and revenue, he revealed:
“We are private, so we don’t share specific numbers. However, we’ve raised over $20M in venture funding, with Lightspeed Venture Partners and Motive Partners as our biggest investors along with a number of strategic investors as well.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Gilbert assessed:
“Our TAM is currently just over $10 billion and we expect it to grow as we add additional capabilities to help larger financial institutions.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Gilbert affirmed:
“There are three major areas that we differentiate from everyone else in the market:
1.) We have the most advanced privacy and security controls. We are the first and only company that has a privacy first approach that doesn’t create audio or video recordings by default.
2.) We create structured data (not only notes) that allows us to accelerate a lot of workflows for advisors and across their firms. We have a Meeting Assistant, Forms Assistant and Email Assistant, allowing us to automatically fill out forms and start workflows for clients, draft replies to client emails, and even build client profiles and insights so firms know more about their clients and can see what their best advisors are doing.
3.) We have an enterprise platform, allowing large firms to incorporate their data into our AI flows from any of their custom systems, and to even set policies and create customizations based on office, line of business, or at the firm level.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? Gilbert concluded:
“We have a goal of adding capabilities to save each advisor an additional hour each week, every six months. AI is moving at such a fast pace, so we believe we can make a single advisor as impactful as an office of 10 advisors in a few years. As AI grows, we are continuously integrating into larger firms and enterprises and handling more workflows across the financial services sector.”
