FINNY raises $17M for its prospecting technology

Organic growth, i.e., getting new clients via the firm's internal sales and marketing processes (as opposed to growth via external acquisitions), is an imperative for most financial advisory firms. And while there are numerous marketing and sales techniques for advisors to choose from to achieve organic growth, they really all boil down to one of two main approaches: Inbound, which seeks to get prospective clients to reach out to the advisor (e.g., via various forms of content marketing); and outbound, i.e., where the advisor reaches out to and/or tries to meet or otherwise get in front of potential clients themselves in hopes that some of them will be interested in talking further.

Overwhelmingly, advisors tend to prefer an inbound approach to growth over outbound: According to our most recent Kitces Research on Advisor Marketing, "cold" (i.e., outbound) prospecting was among the least popular business development tactics, with fewer than 5% of advisors engaging in cold outreach and those who do it being broadly unsatisfied with its effectiveness.

This is for a variety of reasons: From a practical standpoint, inbound marketing can be done on a "one-to-many" basis, so that one social media post or blog article can reach hundreds or thousands of potential clients, while requiring only the amount of time needed to create and post the content in the first place (which makes the marketing tactic very scalable). And although a non-trivial amount of time and money might be required for that content to reach a sizeable audience, eventually the amount of effort needed goes down as search engines and AI tools begin to pick it up and older content can be repurposed to reach new audiences efficiently. Outbound prospecting, by contrast, is done making connections one individual at a time, by one individual (the advisor), and so the only way to increase the volume of prospects reached is to have advisors spend more of their (very expensive) time and effort on prospecting.

And from a psychological perspective, many advisors simply find the mental effort and stress load of outbound prospecting more taxing than other marketing techniques. When making one unsolicited outreach after another, advisors often must endure dozens or even hundreds of rejections before encountering a prospect who is willing to move ahead with the conversation, whether in the form of emails or LinkedIn messages sent into the void, or phone calls that end in a quick "no thank you" or hangup (or cold knocking that ends up with a few slammed doors). While a few advisors have no trouble shaking off the rejections, for many advisors the constant grind eventually takes a toll, with each "no" making it a little bit harder to reach out to the next lead.

That said, as Nick Murray has famously quipped, prospecting is just a "Game Of Numbers", and the odds are that with enough persistence, outbound prospecting will generate at least some new clients; in fact, our Kitces Research on Advisor Marketing finds that cold-calling has a whopping 89% Success Rate for advisors, second only to getting a new client by referral from an existing client. As a result, advisors who are just starting their practice often turn to (cold) outbound prospecting in order to get enough clients to get their businesses off the ground – since at that point, they have both the time and the hunger to put in the long hours of work and endless rejections. But in most cases, once those advisors reach a critical mass of enough clients that they don't need to prospect anymore, they drop outbound prospecting in favor of inbound client referrals, perhaps supplemented by one-to-many marketing or other inbound techniques for their subsequent organic growth.

But despite advisors' relative distaste for cold calling or emailing prospective clients, there's been a flood of new investment and innovation into the Outbound Prospecting category of the Kitces AdvisorTech Map over the last two years. Startups like FINNY, Catchlight, Wealthfeed, WEALTHAWK, and Cashmere have all popped up recently to form a new generation of (AI-driven) prospecting tools, which in essence use AI to analyze a wide range of consumer marketing data to identify prospects whom it would be most worth for the advisor to reach out to. And given the industry's hunger for organic growth, those startups have had no trouble finding investment from venture capital sponsors with their pitches to solve advisors' organic growth problems: 2024 alone saw Wealthfeed raising $2 million, Cashmere raising $3.6 million, and FINNY raising $4.3 million, along with Wealthfeed adding an additional investment from Broadridge in 2025.

And this month, FINNY is in the news for yet another fundraising deal, this one a $17 million Series A round at a whopping $150 million valuation. While this round was led by the venerable VC firm Venrock, it also includes funds from notable sources like Y Combinator and Altruist founder Jason Wenk.

On one level, it's understandable that the sales pitch of tools like FINNY that they can effectively "automate" advisors' organic growth has proven effective at garnering initial interest from investors and advisory firms. With RIAs' organic growth rates generally stuck in the mid-single digits year after year, a tool that purports to solve organic growth by matching advisors with the prospects who are a good fit for them is bound to generate buzz.

But it's worth remembering that tools like FINNY are, at their core, outbound prospecting tools, since they ultimately require the advisor to reach out to the prospect (albeit one that the technology helped to identify as pre-qualified). Such that even though they automate (or at least expedite) much of the work of researching prospects, winnowing down to a list of potential good-fit candidates, and writing and scheduling the outreach itself, their primary appeal is for advisors who do outbound prospecting. Who then still have to meet with total strangers in a cold meeting, and attempt to build trust and persuade the prospects to become clients. Which, as noted above, is only a small minority of advisors overall, as even if the technology determines the prospect is a qualified fit, it's still a tough sale that will require a lot of the advisor's time wading through "no's" to get to a few "yes's".

And that in turn raises questions about the size of the actual market for advisors who would buy outbound prospecting technology, and whether that supports FINNY's most recent valuation. With FINNY reporting 400 firms using its software and charging a per-firm subscription fee of $6,000 per year, we can estimate FINNY's annual revenue at around $2.4 million – making its $150 million valuation an eye-popping 62.5 times its annual revenue, implying enormous growth expectations from its investors. But are there enough advisory firms who do outbound prospecting to justify those expectations?

Assuming FINNY's total addressable market is on the order of 100,000 advisory firms between state- and SEC-registered RIAs, and the independent broker-dealer reps with enough autonomy to buy the software for their own practice (a rough estimate, as technology buying power varies greatly among individual RIAs their advisors, broker-dealers and their reps, and intermediaries like OSJs, but close enough to start with), then their current 400 firm user base represents a 0.4% market share. But as noted above, our Kitces Research on Advisor Marketing suggests that no more than around 5% of advisors use cold outreach as a marketing technique. Likewise, our Kitces Research on Advisor Technology shows that about 5.3% of advisors use some kind of third-party outbound prospecting technology. Either way, the total share of all advisors who use outbound prospecting to bring in new clients is about 13x FINNY's current market share. In other words, if FINNY achieves a 100% adoption rate among advisors who do outbound prospecting (despite the numerous competitors who have popped up alongside it), it would grow its client and revenue base by about 13x to a little more than $30M of revenue – which would be very respectable on its own, but at the same time might not be up to the expectations of the VC funders who just invested in the company for 63x its revenue.

If FINNY wants 20x growth, it would need to sell to 8,000 advisory firms (8% of the total market), if it wants 50x growth, it would need to sell to 20,000 firms (20% of the market), and if it wants 100x growth it would need to sell to 40,000 firms (40% of the market). In any event, in order to achieve growth commensurate with what its investors just paid for their stake in the company, FINNY would need to successfully sell its outbound prospecting solution to significantly more firms than are currently doing outbound prospecting. And not lose market share to other outbound prospecting tools also raising capital and competing for the same (limited) addressable market.

Which isn't to say that it's impossible for FINNY to sell its software to 10,000 – 20,000+ advisory firms. For one thing, if the technology can solve for some of the biggest pain points of cold prospecting and get a higher hit rate of success with less rejection, maybe more advisors will be convinced to adopt it (or at least to not stop doing it once they have a sufficient client base). And although there's a great deal of competition with all the other AI prospecting tools that have arisen, there is no one dominant players in that category as of yet – meaning that FINNY's leg up on fundraising could help it establish itself as the early category leader (similar to how Jump managed to stand out amid the crowded AI notetaker category with to its own "hyperfunding" round). And if FINNY is able to generate more revenue from its power users (e.g., by expanding on its reported "success fee" for larger-firm users), it could potentially reach its growth goals without having to rely as much on expanding the entire market for outbound prospecting and instead by lifting revenue per firm for the few that excel at the approach.

But there are still major headwinds for outbound prospecting tools in gaining significant traction among advisors. Even if FINNY's AI tools make outbound prospecting easier than it has been, that still might not be enough to convince the 95% of advisors who are averse to cold outreach in general, and prefer marketing methods where the prospect (and not the advisor) picks up the phone first that tend to have a higher success rate (as our Kitces Research on Advisor Marketing has persistently found that advisors overweight lead quality over lead quantity even if the latter results in lower Client Acquisition Costs). And while it might make life easier for the firms that need to rely on cold outreach (e.g., those just getting started on building their client base), many of those firms might still only use it until they get enough clients where they don't have to rely on outbound prospecting anymore, which leaves FINNY needing to constantly replace the experienced users it loses through attrition with new advisors just getting started (who are, unfortunately, often very budget-constrained as well).

And so the big question with FINNY in particular (and AI prospecting in general) is not just whether FINNY will manage to rise above the other AI prospecting tools, but whether it can lift the adoption rate of the entire category – i.e., to convince advisors who weren't already doing outbound prospecting to pay for a tool that can help them start doing it. It's notable that there are investors in FINNY with deep knowledge of the advisory industry, including not just Altruist's Wenk but also Ritholtz Wealth Management's Josh Brown, who believe that FINNY's potential for solving a major organic growth pain point for advisors makes it worth funding its future. But it isn't easy to picture advisors who have been overwhelmingly dissatisfied with outbound prospecting rushing to pay for a solution that requires them to do more prospecting, outside of the approximately 5% of advisors who have already built their growth strategy around prospect outreach.

This article first appeared on the Nerd’s Eye View at Kitces.com at https://kitc.es/advisortech-jan2026, and has been reprinted here with permission.

Ben Henry-Moreland 

Ben Henry-Moreland is a Senior Financial Planning Nerd at Kitces.com, where he specializes in writing and speaking on financial planning topics including tax, practice management, and technology. He also co-authors the monthly Kitces #AdvisorTech column. Drawing from his experience as a financial planner and a solo advisory firm owner, Ben is passionate about fulfilling the site’s mission of making financial advicers better and more successful.

LinkedIn | [email protected]

Michael Kitces

Michael Kitces is Head of Planning Strategy at Focus Partners Wealth, which provides an evidence-based approach to private wealth management for near- and current retirees, and Focus Partners Advisor Solutions, a turnkey wealth management services provider supporting thousands of independent financial advisors through the scaling phase of growth.

In addition, he is a co-founder of the XY Planning Network, AdvicePay, fpPathfinder, and New Planner Recruiting, the former Practitioner Editor of the Journal of Financial Planning, the host of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, and the publisher of the popular financial planning industry blog Nerd’s Eye View through his website Kitces.com, dedicated to advancing knowledge in financial planning. In 2010, Michael was recognized with one of the FPA’s “Heart of Financial Planning” awards for his dedication and work in advancing the profession.

LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook | Website