AI finance startup Porter lands pre-seed round with four paying customers

What's the deal? Porter, an AI finance platform for startups and small businesses founded by Michael Fajardo, has closed a pre-seed funding round backed by Redbud VCDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and signed four paying customers. The company builds automated, subscription-based finance teams to replace costly in-house staff.

What's the endgame? "We're building AI finance teams for startups and SMBs," Fajardo said. Porter automates core financial operations so early-stage founders can treat finance as a growth lever rather than a compliance burden.

Why now? Fajardo, a University of Virginia Darden School of Business graduate (MBA '20), built the product after running finance and operations largely alone at PropTech company Lev. When market shifts forced him to automate work that had needed a bigger team, he saw an opportunity. "If I could build those systems for one company, I thought, maybe I could do it for many others," he said.

The product: Porter began as a set of playbooks from Fajardo's Lev days, then narrowed to focus on finance. It targets companies caught between three imperfect options: accounting software built for trained accountants, outsourced providers lacking business context, or hiring a finance team too early. Fajardo built early prototypes with no-code AI tools and found his co-founder, Ben Lieblich, through Y Combinator's matching platform; his first customer was Lev.

What could go wrong? With four paying customers, Porter is at an early stage and must prove its model can scale beyond a small base and win trust for sensitive financial work.

The signal: Porter reflects a wider push to apply AI to finance, automating routine tasks and surfacing insights smaller businesses often miss. Rather than replacing finance professionals, such tools may shift human effort from compliance work toward strategic advisory and decision support.

Read more: Complete AI Training

Image credit: jurvetson