Building the businesses that power America’s workforce.

Ilium partners with forward-thinking retirement TPA owners through flexible ownership structures. Together, we use technology to reduce administrative burden, elevate client service, and drive growth.

What we believe

  1. The companies we acquire are a founder’s life’s work.

    Our job is to protect what made them valuable: relationships, service quality, integrity.

  2. AI should give people superpowers.

    We build custom tools around each company’s specific workflows, so employees can spend more time on judgment and service, not paperwork.

  3. We hold for the long term.

    In businesses built on trust, judgment and expertise compound for decades.

Team

Saagar Kulkarni

Founder

Saagar spent ten years at Stripes, where he co-led the enterprise technology investment team. Saagar has deep domain expertise across employer software and services, financial technology, and AI, and has been fortunate to partner with leading technology companies like OpenAI, Ramp, and monday.com. Along the way, he evaluated the new wave of digital recordkeepers and became convinced that the retirement industry’s most durable asset lies in the expertise and relationships inside independent TPA firms—the conviction behind Ilium.

Ripley Carroll

Founding Team

Coming from a family of small business entrepreneurs, Ripley spent nearly a decade investing in growth-stage technology at Stripes and Telescope Partners, partnering with companies like monday.com, CarOnSale, Hello Heart, and Fundraise Up. Before investing, he founded a healthcare software company. More recently, he has pursued services acquisitions and built AI automations for small businesses. That work convinced him the best founder-built firms don’t need reinventing. They need a long-term home and better tools, exactly what Ilium brings to independent TPAs.

Work with us

We’re building a new kind of home for exceptional retirement TPAs. If you’re a founder thinking about your next chapter—or an advisor, operator, or investor who wants to help build what’s next—we’d love to hear from you.

If you own a TPA or retirement plan administration firm, start here: For Founders