If you’ve arrived here searching for Recap Investing — the sustainability-focused robo-advisor — a disclosure first, because it’s also the story: that firm previously operated at this very domain. This site is not associated with it and provides no advisory services; when the domain became available after the firm wound down, we took it over for an investing-education publication. Which makes the platform’s story the only honest first entry for our Robo-Advisor Graveyard.
What Recap Investing was
Recap Investing Inc. was a New York-based, SEC-registered investment adviser that launched its platform around 2020, in the middle of the robo-advisor boom. Its pitch combined two of the era’s strongest currents: factor investing and sustainability — portfolios tilted by systematic factors and screened for impact themes, with brokerage services provided through Interactive Brokers, one of the standard custody partners for startup advisers. It drew the kind of attention serious startups drew, including a mention in Investopedia’s coverage of the 2020 robo-advisor landscape.
What the record shows
The public paper trail is the SEC’s: registration as an investment adviser (the IAPD record and Form ADV filings are public and searchable — firm records remain visible even after withdrawal), followed eventually by the filings that end every graveyard story. We report what those documents show rather than speculating beyond them: a legitimately registered firm in a brutally hard business, not a scandal. No regulator action, no client-fund drama appears in the public record — the custody sat at Interactive Brokers, which is precisely the arrangement that lets a wind-down happen without client money being at risk.
Why it likely didn’t make it
Everything about Recap’s position maps to the three graveyard patterns. The economics: a 0.25%-class fee model needs billions in AUM to sustain a company (the math here), and few niche robos ever got there. The niche: sustainable investing had passionate adopters but a narrow funnel, and by 2022 the ESG boom had cooled while customer-acquisition costs hadn’t. The timing: the venture funding window for consumer fintech slammed shut in 2022–23, and platforms between seed and scale were exactly the cohort that didn’t survive it. A good product in a category where good products die of arithmetic.
The lesson for platform users
Recap’s story is the calibration this whole site is built on: registration verifies accountability, not longevity. The firm was properly registered; the registries did their job; the business model did what most of them do. So verify both things before funding any platform — that it’s real (one scan) and that its economics can outlive your deposit (our Platform Reports read the Form ADV so you don’t have to). And if you were a former Recap client who landed here: your accounts lived at the custodian, not the adviser — Interactive Brokers support, not this website, is where any account questions belong.