Halifax-based Optiml hit a significant milestone last month as the 100,000th financial plan was created using its platform, which automates retirement and estate planning.

Since it launched in September 2024, Optiml has attracted more than 2,000 customers, providing them with do-it-yourself financial planning software designed to offer more control and transparency over retirement and estate plans.

The platform allows users – primarily those approaching or already in retirement – to build detailed, tax-efficient strategies tailored to their goals, whether that means spending down their savings to zero, maximizing estate value, or carefully drawing from accounts such as RRSPs and TFSAs.

“We have well over 2,000 active customers right now,” said Co-Founder and Zac Davies in an interview. “Of course we’re subscription-based so people come and go but right now we’re at more than 2,000 active users on Optml.”

He added that the big news for the company is that more and more people are coming to the platform because they want independence in their financial planning. The company aims to have 5,000 users byt the end of the year.

Optiml, he said, was built around a simple idea: individuals have embraced self-directed platforms for investing or saving their money, and now they want the same autonomy when it comes to financial planning. Instead of relying on static PDF reports from advisors or juggling complex Excel spreadsheets, users can model unlimited “what-if” scenarios, stress-testing assumptions around inflation, retirement age, government benefits such as CPP and OAS, and market returns.

Optiml operates on a tiered subscription model. Its Essentials plan starts at $9.99 per month, while annual plans range up to $49.99 per month for people with more complex holdings.

Notably, Optiml has grown without raising significant equity investment, other than a small friends-and-family round. The company has relied on non-dilutive government funding programs, allowing Davies and his co-founders Maxwell Jessome and Alexander Ingham to preserve their holding in the company. Davies says the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence has been a key factor in making that bootstrapped approach viable.

“AI has fundamentally changed how we build,” he said, noting that as much as 60 to 70 per cent of his workday now involves coding eve though he’s not a programmer. The productivity gains have reduced the need to hire large development or marketing teams, preserving equity while accelerating product development.

Looking ahead, Optiml plans to launch a redesigned interface in 2026 featuring an integrated AI agent capable of interpreting users’ plans and answering plain-language questions about withdrawals, deposits, and government benefits timing. While the company is currently focused on Canada, it has ambitions to expand internationally and eventually integrate open banking to streamline onboarding and automatically import investment data.

“The big plan [for 2026] is just to continue to scale,” said Davies, adding that the team is working on new user interfaces and adding an AI agent that can actually see and interpret every user’s plan.