According to Forbes, AI startup Finny has raised a $17 million Series A funding round co-led by Venrock, former Vanguard CEO William McNabb, Activant, and others, bringing its total funding to over $20 million. Founded in 2024 by three 27-year-old AI natives—Eden Ovadia, Victoria Toli, and Theodore Janson—the company is now valued at roughly $150 million and serves over 500 advisory firms, including Focus Financial Partners. Finny’s software acts as a prospecting tool, using AI to aggregate data on over 300 million North American prospects, flagging “money motion events” like job changes or inheritances. It then assigns each prospect an “F-score” to match them with advisors, operating like a dating app for finance. The platform processes up to ten billion data points daily and offers subscriptions starting at $500 per month per advisor.
The Holy Grail of Scaling Trust
Here’s the thing: Finny isn’t trying to kill the referral. It’s trying to industrialize it. The entire wealth management industry is built on trusted personal relationships, and everyone knows it. But as CEO Eden Ovadia points out, referrals scale linearly with an advisor’s time. You can only have so many dinners, so many golf games. Finny’s bet is that a system can replicate the outcomes of that referral behavior—connecting the right advisor with the right client at the right moment—without consuming every waking hour. That’s the “holy grail” Venrock’s Nick Beim is talking about. It’s not about replacing the human touch in the meeting room; it’s about automating the exhausting, inefficient hunt that happens before you ever get in that room.
A Market Ripe for Disruption
The skepticism from early investors like Y Combinator’s Michael Seibel was real. Do people even need advisors anymore? But the data, and the market pain, suggest a massive opportunity. Research from Cerulli shows 83% of advisors say time limits are a major growth barrier, a finding echoed by Fidelity. Meanwhile, McKinsey forecasts a shortage of 100,000 advisors by 2034, even as industry fees have ballooned. So you have a older-skewing advisor force with less time, facing a looming talent crisis, while client financial lives get more complex with stock comp and side hustles. The pressure to do more with less is insane. Finny’s early user, Thomas Manetta, claiming a $5 million client from just 12 hours of use per month, is the exact kind of story that will make heads turn in this industry.
The Uphill Battle Ahead
But let’s be real. Convincing an industry built on handshakes and country club memberships to trust an algorithm with their lifeblood—new clients—is a monumental task. Finny isn’t alone; it’s competing with giants like ZoomInfo, LinkedIn, and even Blackrock’s Aladdin, all baking AI into their sales tools. The real challenge isn’t the technology. It’s the cultural shift. Can a system that scans billions of data points truly identify the nuanced, soft-factor fit that makes a client-advisor relationship last for decades? Or will it just lead to a flood of hyper-personalized, yet ultimately hollow, spam? Finny’s argument is clever: they’re not selling AI magic, they’re selling back time. And for an advisor staring down a calendar packed with prospecting lunches, that might be the most valuable commodity of all.
What It Really Means
So, will wealth managers become dinosaurs? Probably not. But the ones who thrive will likely be those who use tools like Finny to offload the grunt work. This isn’t about AI replacing advisors. It’s about AI handling the massive data sifting and signal detection so the advisor can focus on what they’re supposedly best at: the human relationship and complex advice. The industry’s growth is constrained by a simple, non-technical problem: there are only 24 hours in a day. Finny, and tools like it, are essentially trying to create more hours. If they can actually deliver qualified leads that feel like warm referrals, they won’t just be selling software—they’ll be selling a scalable future for an entire profession. That’s a bet worth $17 million.
