Finally: Building the Future of Finance for SMBs with AI

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Hi 👋, this is the Today in AI Newsletter: The weekly newsletter bringing you one step closer to building your own startup.

We analyze a cool, industry-shaping AI startup every week, with a full breakdown of what they do, how they make money, how much they’ve raised, and the opportunity ahead. 

Let’s get to the good stuff in this email: 

• This startup is building the future of finance for SMBs with an all-in-one AI solution

• Since 2022, they’ve seen annual revenue growth of 300% serving over 1500 businesses

• They’ve just raised a $200M Series B from PeakSpan including $50M in Equity and $150M in credit

So what’s the startup and who are the founders behind it? Here’s the story of Finally 📈

Finally was founded by Felix Rodriguez, his wife Glennys Rodriguez, and Edwin Mejia in 2018 with the vision to build the operating system for every small-to-medium sized business (SMBs).

At its core, being the owner of an SMB means focusing on your customers and product—not the boring, repetitive parts that keep the business running.

💼 There are many tools SMBs rely on—bookkeeping, banking, compliance—but most are outdated, adding noise and complexity.

Finally pretty much solves this with their all-in-one platform that automates this for you 🤖. This way you get everything you need in one place and don’t have to scramble with many different software vendors.

Finally makes it extremely easy to organize everything with a clear, easily comprehensible interface.

The startup now offers:

• ✨ AI-powered bookkeeping

• 💳 Corporate credit with spending insights

• 🏦 AI-powered ledger & banking tools

• 📈 Accounting and financial services

Serving as a "one-stop shop" for SMBs.

Backstory 👀

Felix came from a family of Dominican founders who came to the US when he was just 5 years old. All his uncles and even his father had their own businesses.

This was their version of the American Dream. 🌎

As he was growing up, Felix constantly saw the impact of what his family was building and got to interact with that environment a lot.

He always remembers the times his dad sent him with a delivery guy to “make sure the invoice is made out to my LLC!”, because if not he wouldn’t be able to cash it and pay for his private school. 🏫

By the age of 11, Felix started to write code 🌟, and by age 13 he’d started his first ever business breeding Australian bearded dragons. 🐉

After graduating high school, Felix joined the IT department at Park Avenue Bank for about 5 years.

At the bank, Felix had been responsible for everything including SWIFT systems and creating networks to move money all across the world using computers.

His second year there, Y2K happened - the year 2000 software problem. .🛠

This caused widespread panic at banks and Felix was in charge of fixing this. This included a lot of Disaster Recovery: working on firewalls 🧨, making the network faster and hosting early banking web applications on the web.

In his 4th year at the bank, Felix worked on his first ever online business: Tristatevets.com, a directory for Veterinarians. By the end of 2003, Tristatevets had grown to over 2000 paying members.

Business and making money was in his blood 🩸, so Felix decided to finally quit his banking job and start a venture. Felix didn’t know it yet, but this was one of the next 7 businesses he started. 🚀

Felix built:

• Web Image: A website design application service provider with over 2500 monthly paying subscribers. Sold to APLUS in July 2007. 💰

• Yellow Pages LTD: A provider of local online traffic to Yellow and White Pages publishers. Monthly traffic: 1.5M unique visitors. Sold in June 2007 to IREIT. 💰

• ShopHopper: A comparison shopping site. Sold to NameMedia in 2007. 💰

• Yes Local: A local internet marketing company that generated new customers for local businesses by advertising on Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and others.

• Cloverhill: A national customer acquisition solution for small, local service providers. Raised $2M. Generated 70,000+ phone calls 💸

• Turn 2 Interactive: Your one stop source for building a strong & vital Internet presence.

All before co-founding Finally in 2018…

He’d also trained as a martial artist with his kids and got to the point he was a black belt. 🥋

What’s even crazier? The first three businesses he built were all before the age of 28. 🏆

The inception of Finally 🐣

Felix has a grip on what it’s like owning an SMB and knew the ins and outs of getting loans, raising capital and selling a business, but other SMB owners didn’t. 💎

Every business has to be compliant to not get into trouble, raise and grow. If someone could automate this, it would solve a big pain in the ass for everyone.

Compliance relied on boring, mundane and repetitive workflows & processes. This is when Felix decided he wanted to build an AI finance automation platform to solve this.

Felix started with the aspects of SMBs that had the highest cash inflows & outflows which included bank loans and credit cards. 💳

This worked out pretty well, and Finally slowly started to grow. 💫 They started adding more products and use cases to help out SMBs with the goal of making SMB owners’ lives easier.

The advantage of Finally over competition like Quickbooks is just its ease of use. 🪶 With a tool/ledger like Quickbooks it’s super difficult to use and only people in finance can derive the value out of it.

Finally makes bookkeeping simple where you can use it as a ledger or connect your own ledger for Finally to work with.

Stats 📊

📈Today, Finally serves over 1,500 businesses in the US. They make money through a combination of Saas-based subscriptions, interchange fees and interest income.

Their product integrates with Quickbooks, Stripe, PayPal and Salesforce and many more.

🚀Finally hasn’t disclosed revenue numbers, but since their Series A in 2022, they’ve seen annual revenue growth of over 300%.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑The startup currently has more than 220 employees, up from 95 this time last year.

👱Among these hires is their new CTO, Roy Duvall, (Former CTO at Calendly).

⭐The startup has been recognised as part of 500 Startups B24 and has raised multiple venture rounds.

💰On September 9th 2024, Finally raised a $50M Series B and a $150M line of credit from PeakSpan. Previous investors include Encina Capital Partners, Active Partners and more, who bring their total raised to $305M - $235M in credit and $74M in Equity.

Before you go 👋

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Thank you for reading.

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