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FINNY is entering a defining new chapter. The company has closed a landmark Series A with Venrock leading a $15M round at a $150M post-money valuation. It is one of the strongest signals of conviction in the wealthtech category in years — and a powerful validation of a team we backed before the rest of the world understood what they were building.
This moment reinforces the belief that shaped our earliest conviction: FINNY is building the growth engine for the next generation of financial advisors. Their first product — an AI sales agent that helps Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs) grow — addresses the “hair-on-fire” problem wealthtech has never solved. For RIAs, growth isn’t optional. It’s existential.
What captured our imagination early on was simple: while the entire wealthtech industry has spent the past decade building planning tools, reporting tools, and portfolio tools, no one had ever built the thing RIAs actually need most — a way to help them grow. Every advisor knows this is the single point of failure in their business. FINNY was the first team we’d seen who understood it at a fundamental level and were building directly into that gap with AI-native precision. That insight — and their ability to execute — is what made FINNY an exciting opportunity to back.
Maple was first to conviction in 2024 and co-led the Seed out of YC with a $1.5M check. This is the story of why.
The Talent Framework
At Maple, we believe every great company is built by a combination of three archetypes:
Inventors create the breakthrough.
Builders turn it into a product that is commercially viable.
Operators scale it into an enduring company.
Most founding teams start with two people, and we usually hope at least one is a Builder — the archetype most likely to attract the Inventor and Operator. FINNY was different: from the very beginning, they had all three archetypes in place. It’s rare — and a big reason we believe they’ve been able to move so quickly.
👾 Theo (Engineer / Inventor)
Theo is the technical backbone of FINNY — the Inventor who makes the intelligence layer possible. He holds a BEng in Electrical Engineering & Math from McGill and a Master’s in AI from École Polytechnique in Paris. His research in high-energy physics and explainable machine learning reflects a mind trained to reason about complex systems with rigor, structure, and creativity.
Before FINNY, he was an ML engineer at a fintech startup, where he saw how generic prospecting tools failed advisors. That experience, combined with his academic depth, enabled him to architect FINNY’s F-Score matching engine — a system that learns advisor behavior over time and makes personalized matching finally possible in wealthtech. Theo gives FINNY the technical foundation most teams in this category simply don’t have.
🏦 Eden (Sales / Builder)
Eden is the commercial engine — and the gravitational pull — behind FINNY. With a Software Engineering degree from McGill and experience across Tech, FI, and PE at BCG NYC, she developed a firsthand view of how advisors actually struggle to grow. The insight became personal when she tried to find an advisor herself and was matched with someone who didn’t understand her at all — a moment that revealed how broken advisor-client matching truly is.
But Eden’s rarest skill is magnetic: she attracts exceptional talent. She convinced a world-class AI researcher (Theo) and a Stanford product mind (Victoria) to drop everything and join her. This is the Builder superpower we value most at Maple — the ability to assemble a team capable of bending reality. Eden is the force that gives FINNY its momentum and clarity.
👩🏼🎨 Victoria (Product / Operator)
Victoria brings the product imagination and narrative clarity that turn FINNY’s intelligence into a category-defining experience. She grew up in Athens wanting to build something big, and later studied Symbolic Systems at Stanford, focusing on AI at the intersection of cognition and computation.
At Uber, where she spent 3.5 years as a PM leading growth for Uber One, she learned to operate through ambiguity, build systems that scale globally, and understand how real people behave inside the products they depend on. She and Eden became intellectual and emotional sounding boards, pushing each other to aim higher and move faster. Victoria is the founder who sees the shift happening in wealth — the changing face of wealth holders, the erosion of trust, and the need for a more transparent, tech-enabled matching experience — and translates that vision into product.
Together, the trio shares something deeper — a lifetime of being underestimated.
One was the first female captain of her high school physics team. Another wrote a math book in high school. They have moved through elite institutions and competitive environments where they were told, implicitly and explicitly, that they didn’t belong.
That chip on the shoulder is their fuel — and it shows in their ambition: “Build a generational company and make financial advice more accessible.”
It’s the combination we love at Maple: a massive chip on the shoulder paired with a big, hairy, audacious goal.
The Investment Framework
At Maple, we also use the Zero to One / Peter Thiel framework to help guide our investment decisions. Not all factors are fully clear at the time of investment, but we look for clarity of thought and evidence in the market through our diligence on the company and the founders across each area.
See our summary of answers from September 2024 below.
Tech: Growth engine for Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs) starting with an AI sales agent.
Timing: Tech: Gen AI; Economic: $80T wealth transfer; Culture: PE consolidating the long tail.
Monopoly: Focused on serving the top 5% of RIAs — 120 on waitlist represent $1.5T in AUM.
Distribution: Bundle with services that charge AUM fees + access to Merchant with 100 RIAs.
Defensibility: Solve advisor growth first, then own the RIA stack creating high switching costs.
Secret: Wealthtech has not yet solved the “hair-on-fire” problem for RIAs, which is growth.
What stood out most to us was their answer to the Secret question: FINNY is the first AI-native company solving the existential problem for financial advisors — growth. And solving growth is what gives them the right to own the entire RIA stack.
1/ It’s the only “hair-on-fire” problem in wealthtech — client acquisition.
Despite the massive TAM, legacy and modern players have consistently missed the real pain point. They built planning, reporting, and portfolio tools — not growth.
2/ Solving growth gives FINNY immediate product-market fit.
Every advisor faces the same issue. Few are growing. All want more clients. A product that directly drives revenue becomes the ultimate “pull” product.
3/ Solving growth creates massive switching costs.
If you drive an advisor’s revenue, you become impossible to leave. This is the strongest defensibility in the category.
4/ Solving growth earns them the right to replace the rest of the stack.
When you own growth, you can own workflow, CRM, intelligence, reporting, client experience, and eventually portfolio management — the entire OS for RIAs.
Why We Wrote the First Check
My connection to this problem is personal. One of my first jobs to help pay for college was cold-calling for an RIA at BMO Nesbitt Burns in Toronto. Even then, it was clear that growth is everything for advisors — and decades later, the industry still hasn’t solved it.
We were introduced through Shaad Khan, a trusted friend with a strong eye for founders and a fellow McGill grad, where Eden and Theo also went to school. Over months of conversations, references, and back-channel diligence through YC, we built conviction that this was a different kind of wealthtech opportunity: a sharp founding team attacking a hair-on-fire problem no one else was solving — at a moment when $80 trillion is transferring from baby boomers to younger generations.
We moved quickly and aligned with the founders’ exact terms — winning the opportunity to partner against several top-tier firms, including a fintech specialist in NYC and a firm founded by early leaders in the category. We wrote a $1.5M lead check before other firms finalized terms.
Why They Said Yes
“Andre was a different breed of investor from our very first conversation. While others focused on poking holes in our story and plan, Andre focused on understanding us as founders — getting to the bottom of what made us us. That resonated deeply with three founders who have been underestimated at every step of their journey. Add to that the fact that he specifically backs Canadian builders in the US (⅔ of our founding team is Canadian), and it felt like the right fit.”
Where FINNY Is Headed
FINNY’s ambition is clear: to make financial advice more accessible.
By starting with the problem that matters most — client acquisition — FINNY has created the most valuable wedge in the wealth management stack. From there, they will expand into the suite of tools and workflows that define the advisor experience, reshaping how advice is matched, delivered, and experienced.
With Venrock stepping in to lead their Series A, FINNY is positioned to accelerate product velocity, deepen advisor intelligence, and cement its place as the central platform powering the RIA ecosystem.
We are proud to have been FINNY’s first believer and excited to support them as they scale into the defining wealthtech company of this decade.
At Maple VC, First Check is not just about investing early. It is about backing Builders before the world sees what they see.