COMPANY

Name: Finli

Legal Name: Finli, Inc 

Location: Los Angeles, CA

Founded: 2019

Founder(s): Lori Shao

Website: https://www.finli.com/

Social Media: 33 followers on Twitter, 5461 followers on Instagram, 99 followers on Facebook, 74 followers on LinkedIn

Reviews: 5 stars on App Store, 4.5 stars on Google Play

Industry: Global Fintech Market

Size: $127.66B in 2018 (Source: Business Research Company)

Future: $309.98B by 2022 (Source: Business Research Company)

Introduction

Finli is an enterprise payment platform that seeks to put worries of payment delays and defaulters to rest, for schools and other neighborhood small businesses. It does so by efficiently managing administrative tasks, such as invoicing, payment collection, enrollment, reconciliation, and customer management, for local businesses. 

The Product

A comprehensive business management software, Finli has a client base that includes daycare centers, preschools, and after-school care and enrichment programs. The tool is aimed at helping schools save on time and transaction fees. The platform also claims to offer flat-fee pricing to enterprises.

Origin and Founding Team

Lori Shao is a financial services industry veteran of 16 years and a mother of two kids. So, in April 2019, when she decided to quit her day job at JPMorgan and create a platform to manage children’s expenses; it seemed like a natural next step. 

Soon after, she soft-launched the Finli app in May 2019. They were developed with the aim of making it easier for families to manage the cost of raising their kids. This solution enables extended family members and friends to contribute meaningfully to child-related costs, such as school tuition, ballet class, or summer camp. Shao believed that the app also does away with the wasteful practice of gifting toys that are likely to be forgotten about in a few days.  

Seeing merit in this concept, the Techstars accelerator program accepted Finli into its 2019 batch. 
According to an article in Medium, the program made Shao realize that she could do so much more with the platform. So she built an enterprise solution that could help schools and other small businesses streamline and automate administrative workflows. Currently, Finli is operating in private beta mode and is only available to specific schools. But it’s already proving to be quite popular as several daycare facilities, and other child-care businesses are joining the Finli waitlist. The startup expects to onboard more businesses on to the app in the near future.