Four early-stage startups selected for the program’s second year, spanning AI-driven knowledge, embedded lending, community savings and personalized financial guidance.
NEW YORK, July 14, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Curinos, a provider of decision intelligence for financial institutions, today announced the four startups selected for the second cohort of the Curinos FinTech Incubator, delivered in partnership with CoMotion at the University of Washington. The company also named two new members to the program’s mentorship team and deepened its partnership with Databricks.
The 2026 cohort spans the program’s focus areas of financial decisioning, financial inclusion, and data- and analytics-driven innovation:
-
Centring (Greater Seattle) — an AI platform that captures and operationalizes institutional knowledge within Microsoft 365 for advisory firms.
-
Slate (Vancouver / Salt Lake City) — an embedded lending platform enabling Canadian SaaS platforms to offer white-labeled working capital to SMBs.
-
JoinSusu (Greater Seattle) — digitizes rotating savings circles for diaspora communities, with multi-currency support across four countries.
-
Addition Wealth (New York) — combines technology and human expertise to deliver personalized financial guidance at scale for financial institution partners.
Two new members join the incubator’s steering committee and mentoring team. Nate Derby is a startup veteran and co-founder of the North American Fintech Coalition, which connects early-stage fintech startups with community banks, credit unions, and investors. Kushal Shah is Senior Product Manager at Remitly and a mentor at UW CoMotion. Both advise cohort companies on product strategy, go-to-market, and commercial viability during the program.
“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,” said Olly Downs, Chief Technology, Product, and AI Officer at Curinos. “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.”
“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,” said Nate Derby.
“My focus with this cohort is helping founders pressure-test their product and go-to-market decisions against real commercial constraints,” said Kushal Shah.
