Curinos has selected four early-stage financial technology companies for the second cohort of the Curinos FinTech Incubator, a program operated in partnership with CoMotion at the University of Washington.
The 2026 cohort includes Centring, Slate, JoinSusu and Addition Wealth. The participating companies are developing products spanning artificial intelligence-powered knowledge management, embedded lending, community savings and personalized financial guidance.
Curinos also expanded the incubator’s mentoring team and strengthened its technical partnership with Databricks. The program is designed to support startups focused on financial decision-making, financial inclusion and data-driven innovation.
Centring, based in the Greater Seattle area, is developing an AI platform that captures and operationalizes institutional knowledge within Microsoft 365 for advisory firms.
The platform is intended to help financial services organizations organize information held across documents, communications and employee workflows. By making institutional knowledge easier to access and apply, Centring aims to reduce information gaps and support more consistent decision-making.
Slate, which operates from Vancouver and Salt Lake City, provides an embedded lending platform that enables Canadian software-as-a-service companies to offer white-labeled working capital products to small and midsized businesses.
Embedded lending allows financing to be offered directly within the software platforms that businesses already use. This can give small companies access to capital without requiring them to leave their operating systems and complete a separate application through a traditional lender.
JoinSusu, based in the Greater Seattle area, is digitizing rotating savings circles used by diaspora communities. Its platform supports multiple currencies and operates across four countries.
Rotating savings circles allow members of a group to contribute money regularly, with the pooled funds distributed to individual participants according to an agreed schedule.
JoinSusu is seeking to move these community-based financial arrangements onto a digital platform while preserving the trust and shared participation that make the model useful to members.
Addition Wealth, based in New York, combines technology with access to human financial professionals to deliver personalized financial guidance through financial institution partners.
The company’s platform is designed to help banks, credit unions and other institutions provide financial education and advice to a larger number of customers without relying entirely on traditional one-on-one advisory models.
The incubator will provide participating startups with mentorship, industry perspectives, data and connections to financial institutions.
Curinos offers decision intelligence and analytics to banks, credit unions and other financial services companies. Its involvement gives participating founders access to information about how financial institutions evaluate products, manage risk and make technology purchasing decisions.
CoMotion provides startup incubation, mentorship and commercialization support through the University of Washington.
The partnership combines Curinos’ financial services data and market expertise with CoMotion’s experience supporting early-stage founders and university-affiliated innovation.
Curinos also added Nate Derby and Kushal Shah to the incubator’s steering committee and mentorship team.
Derby is a startup executive and co-founder of the North American Fintech Coalition, an organization that connects early-stage fintech companies with community banks, credit unions and investors.
He will help founders understand the operating requirements, priorities and commercial constraints of smaller financial institutions.
Shah is a senior product manager at Remitly and a mentor at UW CoMotion. He will advise the cohort on product development, go-to-market strategy and commercial viability.
The mentors will work with participating companies to test whether their products address meaningful customer problems and whether their sales strategies reflect the realities of working with regulated financial institutions.
The program has also expanded its relationship with Databricks, which began supporting the incubator during its inaugural year in 2025.
Members of the 2026 cohort may qualify for up to $50,000 in Databricks product credits, along with technical support and training resources through the Databricks for Startups program.
These resources can help the startups build and scale data-intensive products without absorbing the full cost of enterprise data infrastructure during their early stages.
Curinos launched the FinTech Incubator in 2025 with Nudge Money, AltCred and Prof of Wall Street as its inaugural cohort.
Nudge Money founder and CEO Reagan Bonlie said the program helped the company refine its approach to scale and make more informed strategic decisions.
Curinos plans to use the second year of the program to continue connecting fintech founders with experienced operators, financial institutions and technical resources.
KEY QUOTES:
“This cohort is exactly what we set out to support — founders using data and AI to solve real problems in financial services, from institutional knowledge and embedded lending to community savings and personalized advice. Pairing Curinos’ market insight and proprietary data with CoMotion’s incubation model gives these teams a genuine head start, and adding Nate and Kushal to our steering committee deepens the expertise we can put behind them.”
Olly Downs, Chief Technology, Product and AI Officer at Curinos
“The strongest fintech products come from founders who understand how credit unions and community banks actually operate, and connecting those two worlds is what this program does.”
Nate Derby, Co-Founder of the North American Fintech Coalition
“My focus with this cohort is helping founders pressure-test their product and go-to-market decisions against real commercial constraints.”
Kushal Shah, Senior Product Manager at Remitly and Mentor at UW CoMotion
“Going through the incubator changed how we thought about scale. The mentorship was direct and practical, and access to Curinos’ industry perspective helped us make sharper decisions at a critical moment.”
Reagan Bonlie, Founder and CEO of Nudge Money
