HARRISBURG, PA — Daniel Starr spent more than a decade in the cockpit of an F-15, where checklists, precision, and split-second judgment are the difference between success and failure. Today, this Air Force veteran is applying that same discipline to a very different mission: building an AI startup that seeks to eliminate one of the most persistent headaches in the wealth-management world: regulatory compliance for investment advisers.
Starr is building that solution — MacroPivot — in downtown Harrisburg, inside Harrisburg University’s Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship (CIE). Founded in 2019, the CIE delivers entrepreneurial education, mentorship, and hands-on startup support to HU students and faculty as well as entrepreneurs across Central Pennsylvania, with a longstanding commitment to reaching women and other historically underserved communities.
The results speak for themselves: the CIE has incubated 24 startups, supported more than 150 founders, and engaged more than 700 HU students in real-world venture building — and companies in its portfolio have raised more than $11 million in capital. From its headquarters in Strawberry Square, the CIE runs incubator programming and signature events such as the annual launchU student startup competition, while its free Small Business Accelerator, held in partnership with M&T Bank, has helped more than 120 local businesses since 2022 and earned the Catalyst Award from the Harrisburg Regional Chamber and Capital Region Economic Development Corporation.
MacroPivot has worked officially with the University for about a year, and the partnership runs deep: four HU student interns are contributing everything from user experience (UX) design to AI architecture. The company’s early momentum landed MacroPivot (then called Pivot Financial AI) on Central Penn Business Journal’s 2025 “In the Lead” list, recognizing the region’s most promising young companies.
Starr sat down with HU to talk about his path from fighter pilot to founder, the problem he is solving, the HU students helping him build it, and where MacroPivot is headed next.
Let’s start with your background. What led you from the Air Force to founding a fintech startup?
“I’m an Air Force Academy graduate. I was an F-15 fighter pilot and served a little over 12 years. When I got out, I was interested in a lot of different areas; I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, and I was finally in a position to take that leap. Finance was the natural focus. I’ve invested for a long time and really enjoyed it. Long story short, we ran into one of the Langans from Lane Financial, who put us in contact with the CIE, and we’ve been working with the CIE ever since. It’s been a good journey.”
Was compliance always the idea?
“Initially, my focus was on research. I wanted to bring a Bloomberg terminal to the regular investor. But as we were building, I realized that wasn’t going to be the best allocation of resources, and we pivoted toward a definitive pain point. I had started my own registered investment adviser firm while I was starting this company. And as I built the RIA, I saw the pain points firsthand. Going through the audit process was super frustrating and very time-consuming. All these things helped form what we’re addressing — these are the issues I was dealing with on a day-to-day basis.”
For readers who aren’t familiar, what is MacroPivot building?
“We’ve been working on this for about a year and a half now, and officially with the University for about a year. We’re building a compliance and immutable logging platform for investment advisers. A lot of what investment advisers do, pain-point-wise, is dealing with compliance.”
What does the compliance burden actually look like, day to day?
“As an adviser, there are a lot of regulatory hurdles you have to clear. If you make a post on LinkedIn, that’s an advertising and marketing component. You have to track that. Any little thing you do, you have to track: engagement with clients, phone calls, messaging, emails. There are certain keywords you can get in trouble for — saying something is “guaranteed” or a “sure thing.” And say I’ve got a client who wanted to be allocated in specific stocks. I told him he was, but it turns out we allocated him in something else. Now he’s lost money and he’s upset.
“The solutions currently on the market are all retroactive. What we’re building is proactive: something that catches these issues as they’re happening, in real time, and gives the adviser the key steps they need to take to prevent an audit failure.”
Why is that burden especially heavy for smaller firms?
“Firms will typically have a named chief compliance officer, or a fractional CCO. With larger firms, when you’re paying for that, the cost is pretty exorbitant. As a smaller firm it becomes more challenging, and you typically have someone who is the compliance officer. That’s a challenge, because as an investment adviser, you’re doing business development and sales, you’re managing portfolios, you’re dealing with compliance, audit prep, you name it.
“Small RIAs are underserved, plain and simple. If you have hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in assets under management, there are plenty of solutions for you — and they’re all 50, 100, 250 grand a year, and you can afford to pay that, and you pass it on to the client. I talked with an RIA recently whose compliance software fees pass roughly $55,000 a month on to their clients. That’s pretty extraordinary.”
Walk us through how the platform works in practice.
“Advisers will create their own portal, just like any other platform. We’ve got a platform built that can look at portfolios, clients, risk analysis, compliance, and the audit trail. They’ll create a profile, we can import data from their clients, and from there it starts to track what’s happening — different trades, engagement with the adviser.
“As an adviser, you have to have a certain number of touchpoints, like an annual review with your client. And if there are structural changes in a client’s life — a divorce, a death in the family, a kid’s college fund — their financial outlook is going to shift, and the adviser has to stay on top of that. We’re able to track that data, map out how things are supposed to go, and ensure they’re taking the appropriate precautions from a compliance perspective.”
So it’s less about replacing the adviser and more about extending them.
“Think of it as a personal assistant for an adviser. The biggest challenge advisers face is that there are too many things to do and not enough time in the day. Compliance takes up a lot of time per week if you’re going to do it the right way. What they’d really like to be doing is business development and client engagement — making sure clients are happy, keeping churn low, onboarding new clients. That’s how they make money: by helping their clients succeed and preserve and grow their wealth. But they can’t do that if they’re constantly buried in compliance documents.
“A human is still going to be in the loop. They’ll have to confirm that it makes sense based on their licensing and that it aligns with the best interests of their client. Typically, they’re fiduciaries, and this allows them to do that job and catch things they might not otherwise see, especially if their firm is growing quickly. Some of these mistakes can be very costly.”
Where is the company today?
“We’re almost done with our demo. I’d say it’s 95 percent complete. It’s not a PowerPoint I’m clicking through; it’s actual chat functionality. As we finish the demo, we’re pushing for momentum as we get into a funding round. To get this off the ground, we have to have funding — anything AI is expensive, especially as we onboard clients, build out the architecture, protect client data, and work toward SOC 2 compliance.”
What does the road map look like beyond compliance?
“This is a phase-based approach where we have multiple components. The first big wedge into the market is going to be compliance, and then we’re going to add different components to it. CRM is a big function of it as well, and then portfolio management.”
HU students are working on this alongside you. What has that looked like?
“We’ve got four interns on the project currently, and they’re all doing great work. We’ve had a number of different students throughout the year we’ve been with the CIE, but currently we have four, each focusing on different realms: UX and platform design, back-end development, architecture, and AI implementation. They’re each focused on specific things, and they’re doing great work. One student designed our website, and another built the front-end component.”
A CIE Milestone
For the CIE, MacroPivot represents a milestone. “I think the difference for this project is its complexity,” said Michael Hughes, Development Manager at the CIE. “They were tackling a complex set of challenges, and it required some advanced skill sets on the part of the students brought to the table. It’s probably the most complex implementation we’ve put together.”
It is the CIE model working as designed: a founder with deep industry knowledge and a firsthand view of the problem, paired with HU talent, mentorship, and infrastructure, building a technology company in downtown Harrisburg.
MacroPivot is currently being incubated in the Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Harrisburg University. To learn more about the CIE’s programs, or to explore how your business or idea can plug into HU’s innovation ecosystem, visit CIE.HarrisburgU.edu or reach out to CIE@HarrisburgU.edu.
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ABOUT HARRISBURG UNIVERSITY
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MEDIA CONTACT
Do you have questions about this story? Interested in lining up an interview? Please contact Dan Wilhelm, Director of Communications for Harrisburg University, at DWilhelm@HarrisburgU.edu or 717.901.5100×1724.
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