Forget cold-calling or dialing for dollars. Artificial intelligence may soon become a broker’s most valuable assistant, thanks to New York City–based fintech startup Finny.
During Finny’s first 18 months, cofounder and CEO Eden Ovadia quite literally lived at the office. The company’s headquarters consisted of two conference rooms, one of which doubled as her bedroom each night. The minimal setup was intentional, designed to demonstrate commitment to skeptical investors who questioned the decision to build the company in New York rather than San Francisco. Ovadia, now 27, and her cofounders—Stanford computer science graduate Victoria Toli and machine learning researcher Theodore Janson, both also 27—were determined to disrupt U.S. wealth management with an AI-powered sales and marketing platform that works like a dating app for financial advisors and potential clients. The trio was featured on the Forbes Under 30 AI list in 2026.
Investor confidence appears to be growing. Finny recently raised $17 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Venrock, former Vanguard chairman and CEO William McNabb, Activant, Altruist founder Jason Wenk, and Y Combinator. Founded in 2024, the company has now raised more than $20 million in total funding, serves over 500 advisory firms—including Focus Financial Partners, Integrated Partners, and Apollon Wealth Management—and is valued at roughly $150 million.
Early skepticism was significant. Before backing the company, Y Combinator partner Michael Seibel questioned whether financial advisors were even necessary. “I went in thinking, do people really need financial advisers, or can you just put money in an index fund and follow a simple allocation?” he said. But Finny’s founders demonstrated how complex the financial lives of affluent Americans have become, from stock-based compensation to multiple income streams and side businesses, making personalized advice increasingly valuable.
That skepticism reflects broader industry realities. Wealth management remains dominated by older advisors and referral-driven relationships, making it resistant to disruption. Still, Venrock partner Nick Beim believes Finny addresses the industry’s most elusive goal: organic asset growth. “This is the holy grail of wealth management,” he said. “Finny is a shortcut to that holy grail.”
Finny’s platform operates in three layers. First, its AI aggregates publicly available information alongside licensed private data to build a database of more than 300 million potential prospects across North America. It continuously monitors “money motion events” such as career changes, inheritances, marriages, and liquidity events like selling a business. Second, prospects are ranked using Finny’s proprietary prioritization algorithm, which assigns an “F-score” that matches advisors and clients based on shared characteristics, expertise, and niche alignment. Finally, outreach messaging is personalized using these insights. To keep the system current, Finny processes between six and ten billion data points every day.
The company offers individual advisor subscriptions starting at $500 per month and competes with platforms such as ZoomInfo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Apollo, and other AI-enabled prospecting tools. Unlike broader sales platforms, Finny focuses exclusively on wealth management.
Some advisors are already seeing results. Thomas Manetta, founder of Manetta Wealth and a former Charles Schwab executive, said that after using Finny for just a few months, he closed a $5 million client while spending roughly twelve hours per month on the platform.
Still, adoption remains a challenge. Many wealth managers remain wary of outsourcing prospecting to AI, emphasizing that trust and personal relationships remain central to client acquisition. Finny does not dispute the importance of referrals—but questions their scalability.
“Referrals scale linearly with your time, and time is your most valuable resource,” Ovadia said. “If it takes ten hours of dinners to generate one referral, we’re building a system that can deliver similar outcomes continuously, even when you’re not working.”
Industry data supports the argument. A large majority of registered investment advisors cite time constraints and limited support as major barriers to growth, while marketing and business development remain top priorities for many firms. At the same time, the wealth management industry faces a projected shortage of nearly 100,000 advisors by 2034, even as total fee revenue continues to rise.
Whether artificial intelligence will replace traditional wealth managers—or empower the best of them to scale faster—remains an open question. Finny is betting that the future lies not in replacing human relationships, but in amplifying them.
