Powering the meaning in money

Over the course of more than 20 years serving clients and overseeing over $100b in wealth management assets, David Barnard had a front row seat to seismic changes taking place in the industry. In 2021, he joined forces with Joe Lonsdale, a legendary software entrepreneur and venture capitalist, to start Luminary and build technology for the next generation of advisor services.

Successful client relationships always work backwards from well defined goals. However, when those included the tax efficient transfer of assets to generational and charitable beneficiaries, David recognized that analysis was exceedingly labor intensive for advisors and understanding strategy options was unnecessarily complicated for clients.

At the heart of the problem is trust & estate information stuck in original documents, compounded by disconnected tools used for simulating and presenting tax and beneficiary outcomes. And when work was done, it tended to be one-off rather than an ongoing service, missing an enormous opportunity to report tax-value created as part of the client deliverable.

Luminary is technology transforming wealth transfer. Using AI powered tools to connect analog trust & estate data directly into scalable tools for modeling, visualizing, and reporting, we enable wealth, legal, and tax advisors to work together to elevate client engagement, differentiate their practices in the marketplace, and grow with scale efficiency.