How FINNY's new 'Hunter' agent targets RIA advisors' organic growth problem

After spending the past two years building AI infrastructure for financial advisors and earning backing from some big names, FINNY is now putting its capabilities to work in a single autonomous agent.

The advisor marketing tech startup, which launched out of YCombinator in summer 2024 and has raised more than $20 million from institutional investors – most recently including a $17 million Series A in December – has unveiled Hunter, an AI agent the company describes as a virtual chief growth officer for advisors.

According to a statement announcing the new agent Tuesday, the tool is designed to generate marketing content for multiple channels, run outreach campaigns, and refine client targeting – all without requiring deep marketing expertise from the advisor using it.

The announcement arrives as organic growth remains one of the most persistent challenges facing the independent advisory space. The latest Schwab RIA Benchmarking Study of independent firms found that organic growth contributed 9.2% to overall AUM expansion for firms under $250 million in 2024, and just 5% for larger firms. But that number grows to 12.5% for top-performing firms, reflecting in part the degree to which marketing infrastructure shapes outcomes.

The same study found that firms with a documented marketing plan, an ideal client persona and a defined value proposition gained 67% more new clients and 68% more new client assets in 2024 compared with firms that had none of those things in place. Despite the clear correlation, fewer than one-third of firms under $250 million had a documented marketing plan, and just 47% had a written client value proposition.

FINNY co-founder and CEO Eden Ovadia says Hunter is built to help address that gap directly. Over two years of watching advisors use the platform, a consistent pattern emerged around who was succeeding and who was not.

"The common thread amongst advisors who saw success on FINNY was that they either had a marketing expert working for them or they were marketing experts themselves," Ovadia told InvestmentNews. "What Hunter finally does is removes the need to be a pro marketer yourself, and Hunter actually becomes your marketing partner."

As Ovadia explained, Hunter builds a profile of each advisor by pulling from their website, LinkedIn presence, past email content and a live onboarding session that FINNY conducts with every new user. The transcript of that session is fed into the system as training data. From there, the agent generates content in the advisor's voice, analyzes campaign performance over time and identifies which client niches are actually producing results – sometimes surfacing findings that diverge from what advisors initially assumed about their own business.

Although FINNY's Tuesday announcement positions Hunter as a "chief growth officer," Ovadia is clear that the tool is not meant to displace the human professionals currently holding that role. She argues that their incentives – driving AUM growth for the firm – are fundamentally aligned with adopting tools that multiply what a team can accomplish.

FINNY "do[es] have tools and functionality specifically for growth teams," she said, calling it "a massive force multiplier."

Read more: What's the biggest growth challenge for family offices? Ask a chief growth officer

That framing extends to the broader debate around referral-based growth. While referrals have been the traditional go-to tactic, Ovadia sees real limits from relying on them as a long-term strategy. "Referrals are the least scalable growth lever that firms can pull, and they are increasingly non-scalable and expensive," she said.

In Schwab's research, acquiring new clients through client referrals ranked as the top strategic priority for advisors in 2025 – taking first place for the fourth time in five years – and firms with documented referral plans generated 1.4 times more new clients from those channels than firms without them.

Ovadia's broader argument, though, concerns cost. As firms scale and advisor time grows more valuable, she insists that the soft-dollar expense of maintaining a referral network becomes harder to overlook.

On that front, she argued that breakaway RIAs are undertracking a key metric. "The number one thing that breakaway advisors should be looking at is customer acquisition costs," Ovadia said, "and specifically including not just hard dollar spend" — the visible outlays on ads and events — but also time, which she describes as the largely unmeasured soft-dollar component of most growth strategies.

The launch also lands amid accelerating AI adoption across the industry. The Schwab study found 68% of advisory firms now use AI in some capacity, with generating marketing content ranking as the second most common application among larger firms at 38%. Twenty percent of all firms surveyed reported using AI specifically to develop digital marketing content. FINNY is positioning Hunter as purpose-built for that function rather than a general-purpose AI tool adapted for advisory workflows.

Schwab's data does suggest that the combination of clear positioning and consistent marketing execution carries a measurable payoff: top-performing firms gained 2.5 times more assets from new clients than all other firms in 2024 and carried a five-year revenue compound annual growth rate roughly double that of their peers.

Hunter is currently available to members of FINNY's Product Advisory Board, with a broader rollout planned through the rest of April.

"We're going to start deploying more and more sets of skills and tools for the advisor," Ovadia said, noting her firm's plans to go beyond its traditional focus on prospecting and cold outbound. "Any activity that would lead to AUM growth is something we plan on helping advisors with."