One startup is betting that AI agents will become an invaluable tool for the country’s 33 million small businesses, and it just raised a fresh round of funding to bring to life its vision for an “AI CFO.”

The fintech startup, Affiniti, just raised a $17 million Series A led by SignalFire, Business Insider has learned exclusively. Contrarian Thinking Capital, Sequel, Indicator Ventures, Lightshed Ventures, RiverPark Ventures, Rocket Money founder Yahya Mokhtarzada, Morning Brew founder Austin Rief, Chelsea Football Club player Trevoh Chalobah, and other angel investors also participated in the funding round.

Founded in 2021, New York-based Affiniti is a fintech platform for small- and medium-sized businesses that make up 99.9% of businesses in the US, employ nearly half of the American workforce, and represent 43.5% of America’s GDP, according to the Chamber of Commerce.

While SMBs make up the vast majority of businesses in the US, Affiniti cofounders Aaron Bai and Sahil Phadnis believed that they lacked the resources they needed to survive and thrive: namely, a platform to track spending and saving and offer financial analytics that could then be used to make better business decisions.

The duo launched Affiniti in November 2024 with its first products: an expense management platform and a small-business credit card, along with $11 million in seed funding.

While onboarding their first customers, Phadnis said that for many SMBs, Affiniti was the first fintech they had ever interacted with. Additionally, many companies didn’t have finance teams, and they wanted additional tech tools to help complete tasks typically handled by a finance team or chief financial officer.

Around the same time, AI agents were starting to get big in Silicon Valley. The tech presented an opportunity for a new Affiniti product: an “AI CFO” that manages every aspect of a company’s finances, from banking, bill pay, sales, and more.

Phadnis told BI that Affiniti is virtualized in different industries, so it can provide specific financial guidance to SMBs in healthcare, finance, automotive, and other industries.

“Understanding what’s going on in AI across verticals has allowed us to stay innovative, from planning out how our agent can co-pilot a pharmacy’s financial decisions to using LLMs to analyze financials internally to assess a business’s financial health,” he said.

AI agents have been slow to enter the highly-regulated world of finance compared to other industries like sales and advertising. Hebbia, which uses AI agents to help bankers and lawyers with investment research, raised $130 million last year from A16z. Another startup bringing AI agents to research, Auquan, raised $8 million earlier this year.

Moving forward, Phadnis said that Affiniti is focused on customer acquisition and data.

“We believe the real power of AI agents lies in the data they’re trained on,” he said. “If we can become the go-to financial platform for managing all of an SMB’s financial activities, we’ll be in a unique position to create the most accurate AI CFO for each SMB vertical we target.”

Here’s an exclusive look at the 11-slide pitch deck Affiniti used to raise its $17 million Series A funding round.