CircleBlack Taps Robertson Stephens COO Vikram Chugh as New CEO
Vikram Chugh, who has worked as chief operating officer at Robertson Stephens for over eight years, has stepped down from that role to become CEO of CircleBlack, a digital wealth management platform. Robertson Stephens and CircleBlack are owned by the same private equity firm, Long Arc Capital. Chugh will continue to work with Robertson Stephens in an advisory role.
Lincoln Ross had been serving as CircleBlack’s president and CEO since 2022, until his departure earlier this year to The Pacific Financial Group, where he’s now president. However, Ross will stay on with CircleBlack as a strategic advisor.
“I believe the wealthtech space is very fragmented,” Chugh said in an interview with Wealth Management. “There is a lot of opportunity for firms to build a unique experience for advisors where they can bring in applications, workflows, data into one unique experience. And that’s what drew me to CircleBlack, this opportunity to build something that’s unique for advisors.”
Prior to joining Robertson Stephens, Chugh led the business development effort for BlackRock’s Aladdin Wealth business in the Americas and was instrumental in the launch of BlackRock’s Digital Wealth platform, including the Aladdin Wealth capability, the iRetire solution and the acquisition of FutureAdvisor.
Last year, Wealth Management reported that CircleBlack was set to acquire AssetBook, a performance-reporting tech company. Chugh declined to comment on AssetBook. He also declined to say how many advisors currently use CircleBlack’s technology or how large the team is.
CircleBlack has gone quiet over the last several years and has seen rapid CEO turnover.
In 2022, Ross replaced outgoing CEO and President Alex Sauickie, which marked the third change in leadership at the firm in as many years. Sauickie took over leadership responsibilities after the sudden death of the firm’s founder and CEO, John Michel, in 2020.
Chugh said the firm has focused on building and modernizing the platform over the last few years. They’ve been working on building deeper integrations with a select group of partner firms to provide a more integrated experience and workflows for advisor clients.
The company plans to invest in more product and engineering talent to build out artificial intelligence capabilities. Chugh said the company can use AI to make the fragmented data that’s in the marketplace more accessible and actionable. He also expects to focus on automating workflows and improving the client experience.
“I’ve been a user of wealthtech over the last 8 1/2,” he said. “And I can tell you that there is fragmented data. There are these applications that don’t talk to each other. Advisors spend a lot of their time on administrative items versus spending time with their clients. We use the intelligence layer to try to understand what’s happened in the past versus trying to think about what’s going to happen in the future. So there are significant gaps in the wealthtech space as it exists today.”
Chugh was the de facto chief technology officer at Robertson Stephens and played an integral role in creating the tech experience at the advisor level. CircleBlack announced a partnership with Robertson Stephens in 2021 to serve as the firm’s digital hub, but the wealth management firm does not currently use the CircleBlack platform.
“Technology is one of the four founding pillars of our firm, and Vikram has been central to its development, helping design a scalable and intuitive digital framework for our advisors and our clients,” Robertson Stephens CEO Raj Bhattacharyya said in a statement.
According to the 2026 T3/Inside Information Software Survey, CircleBlack had 0.45% market share of the all-in-one software program market, down from 0.52% in 2025. Orion and Advyzon topped the list, with 9.74% and 9.5% market share, respectively, in that category.
