Finny Raises $4.3M to Transform How Financial Advisors Find Clients with AI

Financial advisors have long faced a significant challenge: expanding their client base in a way that is efficient and effective. The tools they currently rely on, such as LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, and Pitchbook, are generalist platforms that do not meet the specific needs of the financial sector. Advisors end up spending up to 60 hours just to convert a single client, which makes organic growth a daunting and exhausting task. This problem, however, also presented an opportunity that Eden Ovadia, a former consultant at Boston Consulting Group, recognized while being recruited for a top role at one of the largest financial advisory firms in the U.S.

Despite the appealing offer, Eden saw a deeper issue at play: the lack of tailored prospecting tools in an industry that was on the brink of seismic change. With the $80 trillion transfer of wealth set to take place between the Baby Boomer and Silent Generation to Millennials and Gen Z, many of whom are uninterested in using the same financial advisors as their parents, the financial advisory industry was in urgent need of innovation. With approximately 45,000 financial advisors nearing retirement, an unprecedented amount of wealth was poised to shift hands.

Instead of accepting the job offer, Eden decided to solve this problem herself — not just for one firm, but for the entire industry. Within two months, she left her position and began building a solution. This led her to Victoria Toli, a friend and fellow AI enthusiast from New York’s startup community. The two shared a deep background in AI engineering and an ambition to create meaningful change. Victoria, a product manager at Uber at the time, saw the same inefficiencies in the financial advisory sector that Eden had observed. The outdated tools, combined with the cultural and demographic shifts, presented a rare opportunity to build something transformative.

Together, Eden and Victoria set out to create FINNY, an AI-driven platform designed to solve financial advisors’ prospecting problems. Their vision was to build a tool that could identify, prioritize, and engage the right prospects at scale, especially for independent advisors, who often lack the resources of larger firms.

Soon after, they reached out to Theo Janson, a brilliant AI engineer and former classmate of Eden at McGill University. Theo, who had just completed his master’s in AI and was leading a fintech team in Paris, joined the team, and within weeks, relocated to New York to help launch FINNY. With their combined expertise in AI, machine learning, and product development, the founding team began working on their prototype, which would soon attract attention from Y Combinator (YC).

In May 2024, just five months after their initial meeting, FINNY officially launched. The platform leverages large language models (LLMs) and generative AI to scrape publicly available data, identifying prospects who might be in the market for financial advice. The system collects and analyzes thousands of data points per lead, from life events like home sales or marriages to business sales or capital raises. It then matches these data points with financial advisors’ niche expertise, creating a master profile for each potential client. FINNY’s proprietary algorithm ranks prospects based on their likelihood to convert, creating an “F-Score” — similar to a compatibility score in a dating app — that helps advisors prioritize their outreach.

Advisors using FINNY can fully automate their prospect outreach, with the platform handling follow-ups, scheduling meetings, and optimizing messaging strategies. Alternatively, they can retain control by using FINNY to craft personalized outreach messages. The tool’s effectiveness has been confirmed by industry professionals like Glen Chesir, a serial RIA investor, who praised FINNY’s ability to simplify the prospecting process and dramatically improve lead generation.

In just six months since its launch, FINNY has become a viral sensation in the wealth management community. Despite having zero outbound sales or marketing efforts, the platform’s waiting list swelled to nearly 250 qualified firms, representing a staggering $1.5 trillion in assets under management. Additionally, in June 2024, FINNY was selected as the winner of Morningstar’s Annual Fintech Showcase from an initial pool of 400 applicants.

Building on this momentum, FINNY recently secured a $4.3 million seed round, co-led by Maple VC and HNVR, with participation from Crossbeam Ventures, Liquid 2, Y Combinator, and prominent figures from the fintech world such as Morningstar CEO Kunal Kapoor and Gusto CPO Tomer London.

Andre Charoo, Founder & General Partner of Maple VC, shared his excitement about the company: “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.”

With this new funding, Eden, Victoria, and Theo plan to expand their engineering team and enhance the platform’s capabilities. Currently, FINNY serves over 40 clients, and its revenue has been growing at an impressive rate, doubling since Y Combinator’s Demo Day in September 2024. The startup’s competitors include generalist tools like ZoomInfo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and Pitchbook, as well as wealth management platforms such as Farther, Savvy Wealth, and Robinhood.