WILMINGTON, August 14 (Hypepotamus) – Wilmington, North Carolina has yet another venture-backed FinTech startup to watch.
Finley, led by co-founders (and nCino alumni) Justin Norwood and Josh Pennington, is designed to give middle-market companies the insights of a “Fortune 500–caliber CFO” without needing to hire a CFO.
As Norwood told Hypepotamus, it is about giving each company “the brain of a CFO or a banker that’s unique to their industry.”
To do that, they are intentionally building, and working with investors, in North Carolina.
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What does Finley do?
Finley goes beyond automating routine financial tasks like expense categorization, month-end reconciliation, and accounting. The platform helps business leaders cut through the “operator’s fog” with strategic and tactical insights into their current and future cash positions, exit readiness, and their ability to raise capital.
“Finley is always on,” Norwood added, providing active intelligence. That means a user doesn’t have to type in specific questions about their business, but instead proactively deliver “insights, risks, and opportunities.” That might look like showing revenue trends, potential inventory and cashflow issues, and what business decisions could impact borrowing capacity.
Building Finley for middle-market businesses is important to the founding team, Norward said. Those businesses, which make up about one-third of total jobs and 40% of GDP in the United States, have traditionally lacked financial technology resources to help their unique needs. Small businesses have strong financial options (Live Oak Bank, headquartered in Wilmington, being one). At the other end of the spectrum, large corporations and enterprises are awash with financial and banking resources.
Those in the middle? Not so much, said Norwood.
“[Middle-marketing companies] are way more complex than those small businesses,” Norwood added. “They exhibit the complexities of enterprise, but they don’t have the budget of an enterprise.” Often, that means middle-market businesses don’t have a full-time CFO (Chief Financial Officer) to help them navigate financial complexities, and there just haven’t been solutions built specifically for them.
Building Finley In North Carolina
The son of two entrepreneurs, Norwood has been at the intersection of AI and financial services for over a decade. After working at large enterprises like IBM, he joined the cloud banking software nCino as the company’s Vice President of Global AI and Data in 2020, a move that brought him to Wilmington, North Carolina. He later served as the CMO for Casca, a San Francisco-based FinTech startup, before ultimately taking the jump into being a startup founder.
Pennington was at nCino for seven years, serving as the FinTech’s Executive Director of Technology and Architecture.
Norwood said that it was important for the team to build Finley in Wilmington.
“SF builds for startups, because that is what they know. New York builds for capital markets, because it’s home to Wall Street. We’re based in Wilmington because we’re building for everyone else.”
It helps that Wilmington’s FinTech scene punches well above its weight. On top of nCino (which went public in 2020), Wilmington is home to startups like IQExit, Synply, Lumos, Approve, and Apiture.
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Finley’s Wilmington roots also show up on its website, where the footer displays an updated local wind and wave forecast.
“Wilmington is both a beach town and a FinTech town, and the water shapes how people spend their week(end) here. Displaying the current “wind and waves” conditions on the site is our playful reminder of where we are and who we’re building for,” Norwood said.
FinTech Funding & What’s Next
Just over a year after launching the company, Finley raised $1.85 million in a pre-seed round, led by North Carolina-based Cofounders Capital. In a blog post about the fundraise, the Finley team said that the pre-seed round will help the team build more products and address more industries.
“When we were looking for a lead VC for this round, we wanted it to be a firm that is both based in our state and focuses on our state,” Norwood added.
The team also announced that Cofounders Capital’s Partner Tobias Walter will join Finley’s board.
Finley is initially focusing on wholesale distributors and independent insurance agencies, two “beachhead markets” that Norwood said could provide a path into other inventory and service-heavy industries. That strategy draws on a lesson Norwood said he took away from Live Oak Bank. The digitally focused, FDIC-insured bank grew by developing specialized expertise one industry vertical at a time…an approach Finley now hopes to replicate.
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