For Parker Graham, closing Finotta Inc.’s $3 million seed round represents a milestone moment.
The CEO and founder has been building the Overland Park-based tech company the past three years with a part-time team. To keep the company humming, Graham took a second job at a liquor store and then a bank. Now, with the seed round, Finotta can go all in and make its employees full time.
“It’s really difficult to have developers who are working at different organizations and coding in their spare time,” Graham said. “It’s just really emotional in the sense that now with this funding, I don’t have to worry about going out and raising funds constantly. I can actually focus on deploying with our first institutions and their customers and perfecting the product so it absolutely crushes their expectations. … This capital allows us to really start to grow and spread the word about what we’ve been doing and really turbo charge our sales process.”
Finotta employs seven and plans to hire two more, including a midlevel developer and a salesperson. The money also will allow Finotta to focus on a seamless integration of its technology into a financial institution’s mobile banking app. The round involved a sole investor that wishes to remain anonymous.
Finotta arms community banks and credit unions with a coveted tool — the ability to revamp their mobile app with personalized customer experiences. The company’s software uses algorithms to analyze a customer’s financial lifestyle, such as where money is spent, to predict what that customer will need moving forward. The app then can promote financial services that fit those needs.
“Banks miss opportunities all day long. They miss car loan opportunities, mortgage opportunities, just because their technology is not in the right place,” Graham said. “So for us, everything starts with a mobile channel. We all use our phones. … Our entire goal is to make that sales process completely seamless and extremely valuable for the end user. At the end of the day, we want to create this rising-tide-lifts-all-boats environment, where the (bank’s) customers are better off because they’ve got the right products, the bank and credit union are better off because they’ve got a happy customer, and if they have a happy customer, we have a happy customer.”
