Eden Ovadia

The growth engine behind the advisor

Eden Ovadia runs FINNY, a New York company that has spent the last two years teaching software to do the least glamorous job in wealth management: finding the next client.

FINNY is an AI prospecting platform built for one audience, financial advisors, and it does three things in sequence. It identifies prospects inside an advisor's target niche, it ranks them by how likely they are to convert, and it automates the outreach and meeting scheduling that follow. The ranking is the part Ovadia's team is most protective of. They call it the F-Score, a metric refined through large language models and large datasets that estimates conversion likelihood for each prospect-and-advisor pairing. In an industry that still runs on referrals and gut feel, a number that says "start here" is a quiet kind of revolution.

The pitch has landed with people who study this market closely. In December 2025, FINNY raised a $17 million Series A led by Venrock, with Y Combinator, Maple VC and Crossbeam Ventures joining. That round pushed total funding past $20 million, following a $4.3 million seed a year earlier. Venrock partner Nick Beim summed up the appeal of the team as "deep technical, product and machine-learning expertise" attached to "a proven product and rapidly growing demand." Earlier backers included Ritholtz Wealth Management CEO Josh Brown and Morningstar CEO Kunal Kapoor, the kind of names that carry weight with the advisors FINNY is trying to reach.

The metric FINNY likes to lead with is $7.7 million, its stated average of new client assets brought in per advisor each year, paired with what the company describes as near-zero customer acquisition costs. Those are FINNY's own figures, but they explain the momentum. For a solo advisor or a small team, prospecting is the tax on growth, the work that never quite gets done because there is always a client meeting to prepare for. Ovadia's argument is that automation of that work used to be a luxury good.

The insight came from a spreadsheet

FINNY did not start as a startup idea. It started as an observation. Before founding the company, Ovadia was an associate at Boston Consulting Group, working across technology, financial institutions and private equity. On the private equity team she worked with some of the largest financial services firms in the country on their organic and inorganic growth strategy, and she kept running into the same gap: even the biggest firms struggled to systematically find and convert the right clients. If that problem was unsolved at the top of the market, it was untouched at the bottom, where independent advisors operate without armies of analysts.

She was well equipped to notice it. Ovadia is originally from Montreal and comes from a family of engineers. She taught herself to code at 14. At McGill University she studied software engineering with a specialization in machine learning, and she founded the school's Women in Tech chapter along the way. Before consulting, she took cybersecurity advisory roles at EY and KPMG. It is an unusually technical resume for someone who would go on to hold a Series 65 license, the exam that lets her speak the language of the advisors she sells to. She tends not to pick one lane.

A dating app for advice

Ovadia's broader thesis is about who the next generation of clients will be and how they will behave. She argues that younger investors will rely less on the personal referral, the friend-of-a-friend introduction that has powered advisory practices for decades, and will instead expect technology to match them with the right advisor. The comparison she reaches for is a dating app: a system that ranks compatibility and surfaces the best fit rather than leaving it to chance. FINNY is built for the advisor side of that exchange, but the logic runs in both directions.

She is also careful about how the AI story gets told. Speaking to advisors, she has spent time correcting the misconceptions that follow the technology around, pushing back on the idea that automation is here to replace the human relationship rather than protect it. The framing she favors is "humanizing advisor growth," giving people back the hours that prospecting eats so they can spend them on the parts of the job only a human can do.

Three founders, one Sunday

FINNY launched in early 2024 and went through Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch. Ovadia built it with two other engineers. Victoria Toli, the company's president, studied Symbolic Systems with an AI focus at Stanford, grew up in Greece, is a Kleiner Perkins Fellow and led membership growth for Uber One. Theodore Janson, the CTO, holds a master's in artificial intelligence from Ecole Polytechnique in Paris and a McGill degree in electrical engineering and mathematics, with research stints in high-energy physics and explainable machine learning. It is an all-engineer founding team, which shows in how the product is built and in how the company talks about itself.

Ask Ovadia what she likes most about the job and the answer is not the funding announcements or the press. It is the standing appointment with her co-founders. "My favorite part of the week is Sunday morning when just the three of us founders get together and plan," she has said. It is a small tell about how she works: the important decisions happen in a quiet room, early, before the week's noise arrives.

There is a through-line in the biography that predates all of it. As a high school senior, Ovadia joined the physics team despite disliking the subject, and was elected captain. The instinct to walk toward the hard, unglamorous thing, and then organize other people around it, is the same instinct that turned a consulting observation into a company. FINNY's win at Morningstar's fintech competition and Ovadia's place on WealthManagement.com's Ten to Watch in 2025 suggest the industry has started to notice.

What she is building is deliberately unflashy: the plumbing that decides which advisor talks to which prospect, and when. If she is right about how the next generation finds financial advice, that plumbing is where a lot of the value will sit.