Female-Founded Startup Poised to Disrupt $100T Wealth Management Industry

In 2023, I was headhunted by one of the largest financial advisory firms in the US for a role as their Chief of Staff. During the recruiting process, it became clear that they actually wanted to hire me to solve their organic growth problem: something I was intimately familiar with from my time at Boston Consulting Group, where I worked with large financial institutions to build out their growth strategy. 

For most financial advisors, expansion of their client base is an existential issue, and the LTV of bringing on a single client is immense. But because there are no prospecting tools built specifically for the space, advisors are forced to use generalist platforms like LinkedIn, Pitchbook and ZoomInfo to build long and noisy prospect lists. On average, they spend nearly 60 hours on cold outreach before converting a single client. 

What’s more, the space itself is in the midst of a profound demographic and cultural shift. Over the next 20 years, an estimated $80 trillion will be transferred from the Baby Boomer and Silent Generation to Millenials and Gen Z, many of whom do not want to use the same financial advisor as their parents. Simultaneously, approximately 45,000 financial advisors managing $3 trillion in assets are nearing retirement, resulting in a massive amount of wealth that will soon change hands. 

I had stumbled onto the type of green field opportunity that is increasingly rare: an industry with very little technological innovation on the cusp of some seismic generational changes. The door was wide open for someone to come in and be part of a new paradigm. So instead of accepting their offer, I decided to go out and solve this problem myself, not just for one firm but for many. 

The early days of FINNY 

Within two months, I had left my job to start working on a new company. I immediately decided to get in touch with Victoria Toli, a friend who was active in the New York startup community. Victoria and I had been connected a few years prior by a mutual friend who was struck by our shared background in AI engineering and our ambition to start our own companies. On our first meeting, we connected instantly over our experiences as one of the few women in our engineering programs at McGill and Stanford and our love of solving hard problems. 

It had always been a dream of mine to start a company with a female co-founder, and the idea of tackling such a big problem in such an archaic industry together was thrilling. At the time, Victoria was working as a product manager at Uber, leading growth and international expansion for Uber's subscription product, Uber One. Having seen how Uber optimized everything down to the tiniest detail, she was surprised to find out how obsolete the tools available to financial advisors were and had the same reaction as me immediately. With her product expertise and our shared skill set in engineering, the two of us set to work on building a prototype for an AI-driven prospecting tool, built specifically for the financial industry. As industry outsiders, we were passionate about the idea of building a platform that would be particularly powerful for independent financial advisors, giving them all the tools they need to grow their businesses.

Completing our founding team 

Not long after that, I made a call to my friend and former classmate, Theo Janson. Theo and I completed our thesis projects together at McGill and he was the most brilliant engineer I’d ever worked with. He had just finished his masters in Artificial Intelligence at École Polytechnique and was leading a team of engineers at a fintech startup in Paris, but he was keen to start his own company. Within a few weeks, he had packed his bags and relocated to New York to join me and Victoria.     

And that is how, after a head-spinning few months, I convinced two of the most talented and ambitious people I know to quit their jobs and join me to start FINNY. A short time later, we received an email telling us that we had been accepted to YCombinator. The three of us joined the Summer 2024 batch with a big vision: to build the first AI agent that powers financial advisors’ growth.

Launching FINNY 

In May of this year, we officially launched FINNY after just five months of development. In addition to the deep AI, machine learning and engineering expertise we have as a founding team, the key to building so quickly lies in our ability to use open-source code to customize large language models (LLMs). We’ve leveraged generative AI to source a wealth of publicly available data that indicate whether someone might be in the market for a financial advisor. Our proprietary algorithms then do the hard work of matching all of that information to create a master profile for prospective clients, and then our AI agent gets to work doing hyper-targeted and personalized outreach on the advisor’s behalf. The whole process can be broken down in three steps: 

1. Prospect identification: Once an advisor onboards, we identify prospects within their target niche, aggregating thousands of data points per lead. These include money-in-motion life events that often serve as triggers for needing a financial advisor: home sales and purchases, marriages, divorces, birth of a child, recent capital raises or business sales. 

2. Prospect prioritization: We prioritize prospects based on their predicted likelihood of converting, creating an “F-Score” that is unique to that advisor and prospect pair. It’s not dissimilar to a compatibility score in a dating app and continuously improves and becomes more accurate the more the advisor uses FINNY. 

3. Prospect outreach & engagement: Advisors have the option to have outreach completely taken off their plate. FINNY selects the optimal channel for high-priority prospects, handles follow-ups and schedules meetings using AI that continuously learns optimal strategies and language. For advisors who want complete control, FINNY will craft a hyper-personalized outreach message for each prospect. 

“Finding new clients is the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth thing most advisors think about when they wake up in the morning, but the options for finding leads are pretty abysmal. Advisors have to cobble together a variety of different tools that aren’t made specifically for our profession, and the entire process is painstaking,” said Glen Chesir of serial RIA investor, Merchant. “With FINNY, advisors are able to easily find the ideal clients of their area of expertise and reach out to them with a personalized message that explains exactly how they could benefit them. It’s been a game changer so far for our firms that have partnered with FINNY.”

In the six months since launch, FINNY has essentially gone viral in the wealth management community. With zero outbound sales or marketing, our waiting list currently has nearly 250 qualified and vetted firms on it, representing $1.5T in assets under management (AUM). In June, we were also incredibly proud to be selected as the winner of Morningstar's Annual Fintech Showcase from an initial pool of 400 applicants. 

Our seed funding 

Today, I’m thrilled to share the next milestone on our journey: we’ve successfully raised a $4.3 million seed round. This round was co-led by Maple VC and HNVR, with participation from Crossbeam Ventures, Liquid 2, Y Combinator, Morningstar CEO Kunal Kapoor, Gusto CPO Tomer London and Deel COO Dan Westgarth. 

“One of my first jobs in college was cold-calling prospective clients for a financial advisor. Even back then, it was clear that client acquisition was a hair-on-fire problem, so when I met the FINNY team decades later I was surprised that no one had managed to crack the code and saw the need for what they were building immediately,” said Andre Charoo, Founder & General Partner for Maple VC. “They are some of the most compelling founders I’ve ever met — they’ve taken their unique perspective and channeled it into a vision that could fundamentally change the space.”

“HNVR is excited to partner with FINNY as they redefine the way independent financial advisors find and serve new wealth. With the US on the cusp of a major wealth transfer, there is a massive opportunity to better serve a new generation of clients and advisors,” said Allison Ball, General Partner at HNVR. “Eden and the FINNY team are positioned perfectly to capitalize on this trend. By combining macroeconomic and social changes with the technological tailwinds from generative AI, FINNY will disrupt the entire wealth tech market, and we’re proud to support them on their journey.”

We’re incredibly proud to be working with such an amazing group of investors, including so many amazing leaders from the fintech world who see the potential in what we’re building. We’ll be using this funding to build out our engineering team so that we can better support the demand for FINNY. 

What’s next for FINNY

Victoria, Theo and I have been blown away by the demand we’ve seen so far and the feedback we’ve received from early users, all of which confirms that FINNY is solving what is arguably the biggest, most pressing need in the wealth management space. This latest round of funding will allow us to scale even faster and continue advancing our mission to bridge the gap between wealth and the professionals serving it. 

If you are interested in joining our team to help support that mission, please reach out. For more information about FINNY or to book a demo, visit www.finnyai.com.