You spent decades building a firm your clients trust—through testing seasons, regulation changes, and countless 5500 deadlines. Ilium was built to preserve your legacy while leveraging the latest advancements in technology to free up consultants to spend more time with clients.
We chose retirement plan administration deliberately: a business of judgment and service, delivered through relationships that last decades. The industry’s consolidators have too often treated firms like yours as books of business to be absorbed. We think that’s exactly backwards—and we built Ilium on three convictions.
A firm is a founder’s life’s work.
Our job is to protect what made it valuable—relationships, service quality, integrity.
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.
We hold for the long term.
In businesses built on trust, expertise compounds for decades.
Every founder’s situation is different, so we keep structures flexible.
Full succession.
You sell, transition on your timeline, and retire knowing your team and clients are in good hands.
Partial liquidity.
Take meaningful chips off the table now, keep ownership, and stay involved as long as you want.
Something in between.
We’ve built our model so the structure can fit the founder, not the other way around.
Your firm keeps its name. Your team keeps their jobs and their client relationships. Your clients keep the service they chose you for.
What changes is what we invest in: modern tools, built around your firm’s actual workflows, that take the tedious parts out of the work—census collection, testing season, annual filings—so your people spend their time on judgment and client service.
Ilium was founded by Saagar Kulkarni after ten years as a Partner at growth-equity firm Stripes, where he invested across software, financial services, and AI, and led the firm’s investments in OpenAI and Ramp. Along the way he evaluated the new wave of digital recordkeepers - Guideline, Human Interest, Vestwell - and became convinced that the industry’s most durable asset lies in the expertise and relationships inside independent TPA firms. He founded Ilium to build a long-term home for those firms.
A first conversation is confidential and carries no obligation. We’re happy to sign an NDA before you share anything. Most first calls are thirty minutes: you tell us how you built your firm; we tell you what we’re building.