Concurrent acquires Spire, a $5.4 billion RIA with 30 advisor teams
Spire's advisors keep their own brands as independent contractors, and both advisors and employees become eligible for Concurrent equity after a year.
Concurrent Investment Advisors has acquired Spire Investment Partners, the McLean, Virginia RIA whose 30 advisor teams oversee $5.4 billion in client assets. The deal was structured as an asset purchase, closed Wednesday and was announced Thursday.
Concurrent paid a mix of cash and equity, according to chief executive Nate Lenz, and additional terms were not disclosed. David Blisk, who founded Spire in 1997 and led it as chief executive, will join Concurrent as a strategic advisor, Lenz said.
The practices themselves stay intact on paper. Spire's advisors operate as independent contractors managing their own balance sheets and can keep using their own brands, but the Spire name is being retired as part of the deal, Lenz said. Blisk called the next chapter one that gives Spire's advisors “additional resources, deeper support and a broader community without asking them to give up the identity of the practices they have worked so hard to build.” Thirty teams splitting $5.4 billion averages out to roughly $180 million per practice.
A stake a year out
Spire's advisors and employees become eligible to receive equity in Concurrent after one year, the one retention term the announcement puts on the record. Eligibility is not a grant, and the disclosure does not say how much of the purchase price arrived as equity rather than cash.
Concurrent's own numbers give the deal its size. The platform oversees $28.6 billion in client assets, up from $16.8 billion at the start of the year, and Lenz attributed more than $5 billion of that growth to advisors who joined this year through recruiting or other deals. Spire's book, folded into the current figure, accounts for a little under half of the $11.8 billion increase; counted another way, Concurrent says it oversees almost $29 billion in total assets.
The appetite has a history behind it. Concurrent was founded in 2017 as an office of supervisory jurisdiction inside Raymond James Financial's independent Financial Services division, split from the firm in 2022, and is backed by Merchant Investment Management. Its first full acquisition, in September 2025, was a workplace retirement firm overseeing $10 billion in assets, and Concurrent advises on another $18 billion in corporate retirement plan assets. The $30 billion target Lenz set last year, which he expected could take three years, is now close; the new goal is $50 billion by the end of 2028.
“We think we are uniquely suited to do more of these, but we will be highly selective,” Lenz said of platform acquisitions. Whether keeping the brand is a standing term for the next platform or a concession written for these 30 teams is the detail the next target's advisors will want from a term sheet.
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