Finley, a Wilmington-headquartered fintech startup building an AI-powered virtual CFO for middle-market companies, has joined NVIDIA’s Inception program. 

Through the Inception program, Finley will gain access to resources and support for AI startups. The company expects to use NVIDIA’s tools to expand its platform's capabilities and serve additional industries, according to a company news release.

Finley, the company’s AI-powered financial tool, focuses on strategic finance and is designed to work alongside accounting and bookkeeping operations.

“We’ve built Finley to be the Fortune 500-caliber AI CFO for middle-market companies,” said Finley co-founder and CEO Justin Norwood. 

Finley’s platform targets middle-market companies that may not be able to afford a CFO and are instead “running substantial businesses on nothing more than a Google Sheet and gut instinct,” Norwood said. 

The company is targeting the manufacturing and retail industries, along with service businesses like insurance agencies, law firms and real estate brokerages, with a special focus on wholesale distribution companies. 

“There’s this really interesting undercurrent right now, where about a third of those wholesale distribution companies are running on QuickBooks Desktop,” Norwood said. 

In 2024, Intuit announced it would stop selling new QuickBooks Desktop in the U.S., although existing users could still renew subscriptions and would still receive security and product updates.

“Intuit has been phasing out QuickBooks Desktop for years,” he added. “They no longer sell it. They’re no longer investing in the platform, and so, quite frankly, these wholesale distributors are on a burning platform. ... We really see Finley not only as sort of this fractional CFO and not only a business coach, but also as this continuity of intelligence because it does uniquely connect to QuickBooks Desktop.” 

Finley’s “memory” comes from combining a business’s financial data with context details about the business. Norwood said Finley remembers details operators share about their business and can use that context in later analyses. 

“With Finley, you tell it about your business once and it remembers,” Norwood said. “It’s able to reason over your entire financial world, whether that be your general ledger or your order data, and take into account what you’ve already told it.”

According to the company's website, the platform was built with enterprise-grade security and encryption, drawing on the same practices the founders used when building software for large banks at previous fintech companies. 

Norwood co-founded Finley after serving as chief market officer at Casca, a San Francisco-based fintech startup that builds AI-native loan origination and assistant platforms. Before his time at Casca, Norwood worked at nCino as global head of AI and data, where he met Finley co-founder Josh Pennington, who led engineering for nCino’s AI and data platform as executive director of technology and architecture. 

“When we entered the era of AI, which I would say is when ChatGPT entered the chat, so to speak, the unit economics changed for the middle market, and so we decided that now was the time to go solve this problem,” Norwood said. 

By working in NVIDIA’s Inception program, the company will gain access to developer tools, training and NVIDIA’s venture capital network. According to a news release, Finley expects to transition to open-weight AI models, including NVIDIA Nemotron, that run on secure infrastructure controlled by Finley.

The announcement follows NC Tweener Fund’s third-quarter investment in the brand. Earlier this year, NC IDEA announced it had signed an agreement to become an anchor investor in the then-named Triangle Tweener Fund, effectively expanding the fund's reach from the Triangle region to the entire state. 

So far this year, including Finley, four Wilmington companies have received NC Tweener Fund investment, and in its third-quarter update, the organization highlighted the fact that “Wilmington is now (its) No. 2 market outside the Triangle for new investments in 2026.”

Finley raised an oversubscribed $1.85 million pre-seed round led by Durham-based venture capital firm Cofounders Capital this summer.

“We wanted our earliest and first institutional investor to come out of the state of North Carolina because we believe we’re going to return the fund,” said Norwood on partnering with Cofounders Capital. “And we want to pay it forward to the next entrepreneur that comes out of North Carolina.”