Alev Lewis

Alev Lewis is a co-founder and Managing Director/Partner of Acacia Wealth Advisors, a boutique multi-family office she started in 2005 alongside Meloni Hallock. She has more than 30 years of experience across accounting, investment, financial, and tax planning, and works primarily with ultra-high-net-worth individuals and families, entrepreneurs, and executives — advising them through complex situations such as liquidity events, estate and gift planning, charitable giving, and tax optimization. She is a fiduciary and is noted for multi-decade client relationships.

Before founding Acacia, Lewis built her career at Ernst & Young and later served as the West Regional Director of Wealth Management Consulting at one of the largest financial institutions in the country. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and a Master's in Business and Taxation from Golden Gate University. She is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and holds the Personal Financial Specialist (PFS) and Certified Investment Management Analyst (CIMA) designations.

Acacia's institutional trajectory has shaped her current role: the firm oversaw roughly $500 million in assets when it joined Hightower's partnership in July 2016 (Hightower's eighth advisory-team addition that year), with Lewis and Hallock continuing to lead as Managing Directors and Partners. Effective January 1, 2022, Acacia Wealth Advisors became part of Bel Air Investment Advisors, another Hightower-affiliated ultra-high-net-worth practice, which is why the acaciawealth.com domain now resolves to Bel Air's site.

Lewis has been repeatedly recognized in industry rankings. She appeared on Forbes' Best-In-State Wealth Advisors list (#85, California/Los Angeles, 2022), Forbes' Best-In-State Women Advisors (#61, California South, 2022), and Forbes' America's Top Women Advisors (#572, 2021), and has been featured multiple years by the Los Angeles Business Journal as a "Leader of Influence" and one of the "Most Influential Wealth Managers" in Los Angeles.

• Her verifiable "investing" is as a wealth-management fiduciary, not a venture/angel investor: Acacia provides integrated investment consulting and financial planning to entrepreneurs, business owners, and UHNW families, with client households typically in the $2–20M range and relationships of $10–50M net worth (per Forbes' team data).
• Approach emphasizes comprehensive, multidisciplinary planning — asset allocation, tax planning, estate/gift planning, charitable giving, and risk management — delivered without proprietary products (an independent-RIA model).
• The source stub's "Angel Investors / Seed Round" label is not corroborated by any primary source; there is no public record of a formal angel fund or defined startup check size. Any early-stage investing she does would most plausibly be personal/discretionary through her UHNW client and entrepreneur network rather than an institutional angel mandate.