A dealmaker in São Paulo opens her laptop on a Tuesday morning. She is closing a $40 million cross-border raise. Ten years ago, this would have meant a regional broker-dealer, a folder of redlines, two compliance officers on speakerphone, and the patience of a saint. Today she opens one tab. The platform is called Finalis. The deal will close on Friday.
This is what investment banking looks like when you stop pretending it has to be expensive, slow, and gatekept by men in cufflinks. Finalis is the part nobody built before. The part that holds the rest together.
The Problem They Saw
Private capital markets are enormous - trillions of dollars move through M&A, capital raises, and private placements every year. The infrastructure that supports them is not enormous. It is mostly Excel, mostly Outlook, and mostly held together by compliance officers who have been awake too long.
An independent banker who wants to run their own practice faces a peculiar obstacle: they cannot legally do the job without a broker-dealer license. Getting one is expensive, slow, and ongoing. Renting one means joining a firm and losing autonomy. The choice was simple - and bad.
Federico Baradello noticed this from the inside. He was an M&A attorney at Kirkland & Ellis, then he supported cross-border investments at a London-based private equity firm. He spent a lot of time watching smart people fight their tools. He thought there was a more interesting problem on the other side of those tools.
The Founders' Bet
In 2020, Baradello started Finalis with a thesis that sounds obvious now and sounded slightly mad then: package the broker-dealer license as a service. Wrap it in software. Sell it to the independents.
The bet had two parts. One: independent bankers are growing faster than the institutions they used to work for. Two: compliance is not a moat - it's a feature you can ship. Hold both ideas at once and a category appears.
Investors agreed. In July 2022, Finalis closed an $11.7M seed round led by Tribe Capital with Animo Ventures, Ulu Ventures, Chaac Ventures, and The Fund - a roster of people who had seen the picks-and-shovels story play out before in adjacent markets.
The Product
Finalis is best understood as three things wedged into one platform. First, a registered broker-dealer (Finalis Securities LLC, FINRA member, ticker on BrokerCheck for the curious). Second, a software stack covering deal pipelines, deal rooms, KYC/AML, transaction templates, regulatory reporting, and performance monitoring. Third, a network - 8,000+ dealmakers who can find each other when a transaction needs two sides.
What you can actually do with it
- Run M&A, capital raises, and private placements under Finalis's broker-dealer umbrella.
- Manage the full deal lifecycle inside one platform instead of nine spreadsheets.
- Use AI workflows for compliance oversight and deal origination.
- Tap an ecosystem for sourcing, syndication, and 15a-6 chaperoning.
- Stop hiring compliance officers. Or hire fewer of them. Your call.
The pitch to an independent banker is small and seductive: keep your client relationships, keep your fees, drop the overhead. The pitch to a private-equity firm sourcing deals is the inverse - one place to find the people sourcing them.
Milestones
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2020Federico Baradello founds Finalis in San Francisco.
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2021Finalis Securities LLC registers as a broker-dealer with FINRA (CRD #305908).
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July 2022$11.7M seed round led by Tribe Capital closes.
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2023Platform crosses 500+ affiliated bankers and expands internationally.
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2024Deal volume on the network surpasses $20B across 24 countries.
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2025Ranked Top 15 US investment banks and Top 22 globally.
The Proof
There is a version of this story where Finalis is a pleasant idea that never quite finds its shape. That version is not the one we are in. The platform now hosts 900+ bankers in 24 countries, has touched more than $22 billion in closed transactions, and was ranked among the top 15 US investment banks last year - measured by deal count, the company sits beside firms with thirty-floor headquarters and a hundred-year head start.
The Mission
Finalis describes its mission as "building capital markets that better serve people." It is an unflashy sentence that hides a real argument. The argument is that capital markets currently serve people who are already inside them, and that the way to widen the door is not a louder lobby but a different set of tools.
Who's inside
Finalis is staffed by an unusually mixed crew - engineers, bankers, attorneys, compliance specialists, and data scientists - spread across the US, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. The leadership bench includes Florian Fischetti (Chief Product Officer), Amy Pisano (Chief Revenue Officer), and Joseph DiGiglio (Chief Compliance Officer). Approximately 140 people total. They do not all sit in the same room. Most of them have never sat in the same room.
Why It Matters Tomorrow
If Finalis is right, the shape of investment banking shifts. The independent banker becomes structurally viable. The bulge bracket loses some of its gravitational pull. The cost of a deal - in money, in time, in the number of people who must be cc'd - comes down. The number of deals that get done quietly goes up. None of this happens overnight. Some of it is already happening.
There is also the boring version of why it matters: a fintech that built infrastructure other people did not want to build, ran it carefully, and turned compliance into a margin. That, too, is a kind of revolution. The quiet kind.
Back to São Paulo. The banker closes her $40 million raise on Friday afternoon. She does not call a compliance officer. The compliance is in the platform. She does not draft the engagement letter from scratch. The template is in the platform. She does not chase signatures across three time zones. The signatures are in the platform. She closes her laptop. She goes outside. This is what changed.