The first Wealthsimple was a spreadsheet. By Michael Katchen's telling, he built it in a single night, and it was meant for ten friends.
Those friends had just come into money. Katchen had moved to Silicon Valley in 2011 to join a photo-scanning startup called 1000memories, and in October 2012 Ancestry.com bought it for several million dollars. Colleagues who had cashed out asked him how they should invest the proceeds. He had a long answer. He had, he told the Globe and Mail, been investing since he was 12.
In a podcast he recalled that a good week meant winning one client, and he phoned new sign-ups himself within seconds of their signing up.
That itch started early. A business degree from Ivey, graduating 2009, led to a job as a strategy and marketing consultant at McKinsey in Toronto, and then the leap to California. The spreadsheet taught his friends to buy low-cost exchange-traded funds instead of paying the high fees Canadian banks charged. "The very first idea I had was not to create a business," he told the Globe.
Then he looked at what he had built. He moved back to Toronto in 2013, partly for personal reasons and partly because almost nobody offered robo-advice in Canada. Wealthsimple was founded in September 2014 with Brett Huneycutt and Rudy Adler. The first outside money was C$1.9M from three Canadian investors, and in April 2015 Power Financial put in C$10M.
The early days were small. In a podcast he recalled that a good week meant winning one client, and he phoned new sign-ups himself within seconds of their signing up. By 2016 the company had about 20,000 clients and 40 staff, and was not yet profitable.
What almost nobody expected was how much the product would matter more than the robo-adviser. In March 2019 Wealthsimple Trade launched, Canada's first commission-free trading app. When markets convulsed in March 2020, the app buckled: demand was so high that the company capped signups and waitlisted investors. It was an awkward way to learn that popularity is its own stress test.
The cost showed up in the products themselves. Wealthsimple has changed its lineup repeatedly, turning Cash from a savings account into a peer-to-peer payments app and retiring Save and Smart Savings in 2025. The company's valuation rose through the cycle: C$5B in May 2021, and C$10B in October 2025 when it raised C$750M, led by Dragoneer and GIC. In October 2022 it became Canada's first non-bank, non-credit union approved for a Bank of Canada settlement account.
By June 2026 it reported about 3.6 million clients and C$156B in assets. The company's origin is still visible in its habits. It started as a favour, a clear explanation for ten people who trusted the person explaining. A founder could do worse than ask: whom am I already helping for free, and what would happen if I charged less than anyone else?