Finlo AI

Co-founder & Chief Executive Officer

Grades 10–12

View website Launch day post Web Summit post Hiring post

Finlo AI is a fintech startup that delivers the world's first-ever “AI CFO,” automating financial insights and reporting for startups and small businesses by integrating directly into existing accounting software.

I started Finlo with Evelyn, my co-founder from XChange, after watching my own father, a small business owner, struggle with the exact problem we ended up solving: accounting software that digitizes financial complexity instead of actually reducing it. He could not get a straight answer out of his own books without hours of digging, and hiring a CFO was never realistically on the table for a business his size. That was the gap. Not a lack of data, but a lack of intelligence applied to it, and it felt personal enough that I could not let it go.

Finlo has since scaled to $900 million in user revenue analyzed, engaging 5,000 users, and has acquired $70,000 in funding while reaching $22,000 in profit. We have built a global team of 40 with experienced student leaders now at universities including UCLA, UWaterloo, UNC, Western, and SFU, and assembled a Board of Advisors drawn from McKinsey & Company, Morgan Stanley, Google, Dell Technologies, Microsoft, Shopify, and the U.S. Department of Treasury. As CEO, I lead product development and strategic growth, including the integration of GPT-5, Claude, and QuickBooks, and I send biweekly updates that track traction, team performance, and strategic pivots. I also led the design and launch of Finlo's internship program, which drew 37 summer interns from over 515 organic applicants, with an acceptance rate of under 5%.

At the Finlo booth at Web Summit Vancouver — At our booth at Web Summit Vancouver, explaining Finlo to an attendee between sessions.

The Web Summit main stage — The main stage, from the floor. We were one of the alpha booths that week.

Opening the session in front of the room — A room of people older than me, waiting to be convinced.

This venture taught me more about discipline than anything I had built before. After XChange, I knew six co-founders were too many, so Finlo runs on two co-founders and a five-person core decision-making group, and we moved off a single chaotic Discord channel onto Slack with separated workstreams. When user growth stalled completely with exams approaching, I made the call to take a planned two-week break rather than let the team quietly burn out, the same slow fade that had hurt XChange, and we came back to it with everyone still in. I also learned to tell the difference between a real product and what I call ‘AI fluff’: at Web Summit, I watched a majority of booths wrap a thin interface around a language model and call it innovation, and Finlo's value only held up because the answer to “what does this actually do, without mentioning AI” was still a real one. None of that came for free; earning the trust of business owners willing to connect their financial data to a platform built by teenagers took total transparency about our security practices and a lot of patience answering the same basic questions over and over.

Talking with a client before the meeting — Most of the real decisions happen in the ten minutes before anyone sits down.

With a teammate at the venue — With Leo, who has been in the room for most of these.

Isaiah Sidi at a Finlo client meeting — Between sessions at the client meeting, before the questions started.

Finlo has been recognized by an angel investor from Morgan Stanley and was invited to pitch for VC-evaluated funding through an affiliated program; he told us Finlo “has the potential to be an eight-to-nine-figure company” in a market he could not believe was still unsaturated. That recognition carried into a speaking invitation at the IPN Summit in Houston, Texas, where I joined 1,000+ CEOs and executives from companies including Uber, McKinsey & Company, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Google, Microsoft, and Shopify.

Part of the Finlo team at the venue — Three of us, on a day that felt like the company had grown up slightly.

Shaking hands with a client after the session — The part of the work I did not expect to enjoy: the conversation after the pitch is over.

Outside the Web Summit Vancouver sign — Outside the convention centre on the first morning of Web Summit Vancouver.

We were also featured at Web Summit as part of their Alpha Startup Program. I was selected for the Web Summit Vancouver Startup Program, part of what Forbes has called one of the best technology conferences in the world, where our booth gained real exposure to 700 investors and 20,000 professionals. It was also where I felt the most out of place I had ever felt at one of these events, and where watching our product hold up against far better-funded competitors did more to settle that feeling than anything I could have told myself in advance.