Josh Brown, the prolific podcaster, YouTuber, CNBC contributor and CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management, has announced he is backing AI-powered prospecting and lead generation startup FINNY AI.
The terms of his personal investment in the firm were not disclosed, but he has also agreed to join FINNY’s board, where he will share insights and help guide the company’s product roadmap.
“I’m not a VC, and it’s fairly rare for me to invest,” Brown said in an interview with WealthManagement.com, as he discussed his interest in FINNY and why he was not talking about the amount he invested, “but I know how much work goes into building an organic growth firm.”
He said he and his colleagues at Ritholtz had found their own marketing niche with the many forms of content and social media channels they leverage and, with them, have grown a large following, something Brown notes most advisors struggle to do.
He received a demo of FINNY nine months ago and has been following it since.
Launched a year ago, the platform has continued to build a client base of advisors and announced a $4.3 million seed round in December, co-led by Maple VC and HNVR.
“The Schwab referral marketplace is more expensive than ever before, and even if you are happy to pay, it and the Fidelity program have gotten so competitive, organic growth is very difficult to come by, and one of the things we hear most from advisors and advisory firms is that they don’t know where to start,” Brown said.
FINNY identifies prospects from its databases of millions of records, prioritizes high-intent prospects based on matching criteria set by the advisor and on conversion likelihood, and then helps advisors with automated outreach and marketing tools and campaigns.
“The specificity advisors can zero in on and giving the advisor a dashboard and then being able to custom tailor those messages, that’s a big jump to what people were doing prior,” Brown said, describing what he likes about the platform. “Success is going to be a consequence of the effort put into it, it has a lot of automation, but it is not just push-a-button—some will put more effort into it than others and reap the rewards.”
FINNY CEO and co-founder Eden Ovadia said the platform works best for advisors and firms that know their niche and have refined their client profiles. They may have been reliant on more limited tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, writing their own content and doing their own mailing list merges.
“We have enough data now to say that when we get it into the hands of people that know what they are doing they have been able to double their efficiency on FINNY,” said Ovadia.
She used the example of a centralized marketing team where one marketing rep might have been able to manage campaigns on behalf of 10 advisors in the past; that same person can now handle 20 advisors and get the same results, she said.
As part of the announcement, FINNY discussed two recently rolled-out features: Personalized Feeds and Campaigns.
With the feeds feature, advisors and firms can easily create lists of prospects based on attributes such as location, industry, employment type, political affiliation, personal interests or others.
“Feeds can be created based on pretty much whatever you can think of,” said Victoria Toli, a co-founder, president and chief product officer of FINNY.
“Campaign generation is the biggest feature we have pushed,” she said, noting that it resonated with Brown when he saw and used it. “It allows advisors to get that compelling content they already have into the right hands of the right prospects.”
Using a few simple prompts and selecting the audience, advisors can automate personalized emails with content they have created (this can also include a compliance review step).
The startup, which participated in and has backing from the prestigious Y-Combinator startup incubator, has also garnered plenty of attention during its short existence, having won the top prize at Morningstar’s annual fintech competition and landed other investors, including Morningstar CEO Kunal Kapoor and Deel COO Dan Westgarth.
In addition, Ovadia was named one of WealthManagement.com’s Ten to Watch in 2025.
Brown joins an advisory board of other industry notables, including Arun Anur, who joined platform provider Orion in January as COO, and Kevin Reed, head of partnerships at Morningstar.