1986: Ric and Jean Edelman found Edelman Financial Services.
1996: Financial Engines is born. Co-founded by Nobel economics laureate William Sharpe, former SEC chief Wiliam Grundfest and Silicon Valley lawyer Craig Johnson, Larry Raffone joins the firm as an executive vice president, coming from Fidelity Investments’ institutional side. He becomes CEO of Financial Engines in 2014.
2005: Publicly-traded Sanders Morris Harris, an advisory firm founded by the former head of Prudential-Bache, buys a majority stake in Edelman Financial Services. In 2011, it changes the combined firm’s name to Edelman Financial Group, and Edelman becomes the CEO. The move makes Edelman’s firm part of a publicly traded company.
2012: Lee Equity Partners buys Edelman Financial Group, which takes it private. The deal is Edelman’s first with private equity.
2015: Sanders Morris Harris sells its stake in Edelman Financial Services to Hellman & Friedman.
2015: Lee Equity Partners sells most of its stake to Hellman & Friedman. Edelman steps down as CEO and moves into an executive chairman role, his first easing out of the day-to-day of his company. H&F becomes the largest institutional holder of Edelman’s firm.
2016: Warburg Pincus buys a stake in The Mutual Fund Store, which Financial Engines acquires in 2015. It sells its stake in 2017, one year before Financial Engines is merged with Edelman’s legacy firm.
2018: Hellman & Friedman pays $3 billion for Financial Engines, the original robo advisor that at the time was the largest RIA. It takes that publicly-traded company private and merges it with Edelman’s firm. The blockbuster deal creates Edelman Financial Engines and turns Edelman’s roughly $800 million company into a $4.5 billion company overnight. Edelman says he “strongly urged” Hellman & Friedman to buy Financial Engines. Raffone becomes CEO of the new firm.