Alto agrees to acquire Forge Trust, adding more than 60,000 private-market IRA accounts

Alto has agreed to acquire Forge Trust Co. and its parent, Forge Services Inc., from Forge Global Inc., the private-market firm Charles Schwab acquired in March 2026. The company announced the agreement Tuesday, and financial terms were not disclosed, according to 401(k) Specialist.

Forge Trust is a South Dakota-chartered self-directed IRA custodian with more than four decades in business. The acquisition brings more than 60,000 self-directed IRA accounts focused on private-market assets, plus 3 million Custody-as-a-Service accounts, to Alto's platform.

According to a statement from Alto, the combined businesses will help create one of the largest independent self-directed retirement investment platforms in the United States, with combined business assets of more than $20 billion under custody and administration. That figure describes client assets held and administered, not a purchase price.

The deal moves Alto toward holding the accounts rather than only the software that documents them. Alto's platform uses AI to automate documentation and execution workflows for private-market investments; Forge Trust supplies the trust charter and the account and partner relationships where those positions sit inside IRAs. The article frames the pairing as an answer to a long-standing complaint from advisers, that access to private-market investments has been limited by custodial architecture built for public securities.

The combined platform is meant to serve both advisers and individual investors through the Alto Marketplace and Alto's Private Deal Room for RIAs, an invitation-only venue for executing private-market investments inside self-directed IRAs. Alto founder and CEO Eric Satz described a platform spanning custody, compliance, a private-market investment marketplace and API-enabled enterprise capabilities, within an SEC-registered broker-dealer and FINRA member, according to the report. Satz also said the combination helps address the nearly $20 trillion that sits in IRAs today, and the announcement describes an opportunity to bring alternative assets into the financial mainstream by making retirement capital easier to put to work.