Before graduating with a Masters of Science in Analytics from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2024, Sergio (Checo) Sepulveda worked for four years as a PLUC strategy consultant for Fortune 500 companies in Monterrey, Mexico. There, he realized smaller businesses lack the robust “financial layers” accommodated by larger companies, such as dashboards and distribution frameworks for their treasury, accounting, or data legitimacy.
“I’m not saying they are an unmet niche of the economic spectrum,” Sepulveda said. “But I will say this: They do not get as much attention… because I’ve [noticed] enterprises louder across the media. Obviously they have a lot more resources.”
Sepulveda decided he wanted to make a career pivot into something that fed his need for “transcendence” and helping less institutional businesses. During this process, he met former financial analyst Arturo Hinojosa and fellow strategy consultant Jona Gonzalez.
The trio started working together on their own consulting company. But roughly two years later, they pivoted from their original idea to Monthly, an Agentic CFO platform designed to be the next financial accounting standard for small- to medium-sized businesses. The startup launched in the first half of 2026 and now operates in Chapel Hill and Monterrey, Mexico, with 22 total employees.
What Monthly provides
Essentially functioning as a SaaS CFO, Monthly provides it users with forecasting, benchmarking, more than 50 metrics, and detailed financial reports.
It also comes with a personalized dashboard, providing more expansive financial data concerning factors like revenue, return on equity (ROE), and an up-to-date tracker of a business’s valuation over time. In essence, the dashboard shows what its users should keep an eye on regarding their industry and needs.
“We call this the gold layer,” Sepulveda said.
Monthly also generates automation for accounting, according to Sepulveda, and can be integrated into a user’s accounting system to access the general ledger—a master accounting record for assets, liabilities, revenue, equity, and expenses.
Once integrated, the software categorizes the information and works it through the “wave” framework, which is essentially a generative AI and deterministic machine learning model that audits the data for necessary calculations.
Supplementing this are additional AI tools, like “AskMara,” a chatbot with insight on a business’s history that can provide answers to more complex questions with data charts.
Finally, Monthly also comes with a benchmarking tool called “Compass,” which enables customers to compare and contrast their business to others in their specified market in a more stat-driven manner.
“We were able to validate the customer’s need and make the features according to [their] necessity,” Sepulveda said of this full suite of offerings.
Setting Monthly apart
Sepulveda believes that what makes Monthly stand out is the fact that its AI focuses on “data legitimacy,” and the platform doesn’t solely leverage generative AI.
“[People’s] attention is so much on whether [a given] AI is the better one. But in reality, AI serves little if the data is not readily in place, or is not validated. That’s why we decided to go beyond in terms of, first, the extraction of the data.”
It is also one of the only companies to develop synchronizers or connectors for non-cloud native accounting systems.
Building in NC and beyond
The co-founders bootstrapped the startup to get it off the ground. Today, their revenue comes mainly from their monthly subscription, priced depending on the user’s annual revenue. It starts at $700 per month for those under $100 million.
Sepulveda has by now spent significant time building the startup and expanding its reach in the United States. Notably, the Georgia Tech graduate and his team have already been through the Launch Powered by KPMG accelerator in Chapel Hill—despite, at that time, being based primarily in Mexico.
“The fact that they were receiving an international participant in the program, and it was only the second cohort of the program, it was pretty new,” he said. “They were super supportive.”
Not only did this experience give him a closer look at the funding landscape in North Carolina, but it also enhanced his perspective on the broader U.S. market Monthly is aiming to cultivate for its platform.
The Monthly team also pitched at ConvergeSouth in Winston-Salem late in the summer and subsequently competed at the Startup World Cup regional competition in San Francisco.
QUICK BITS
Startup: Monthly
Co-Founders: Sergio Sepulveda, Arturo Hinojosa, Jona Gonzalez
Founded: 2026
Team size: 25
Location: Chapel Hill & Monterrey
Website: monthly.la
Funding: Bootstrapped
Monthly currently has 60 customers in their database and $500,000 in their Average Accounting Return (AAR). But Sepulveda said one of their biggest achievements was growing their tech team from 6 to 22 employees, despite not having had enough funding for this kind of growth when they started.
“I’m really proud of my team. We’ve obviously grown since then, but I really appreciate having them along.”
Thanks to their testing phases, Sepulveda says he is happy the Monthly team “co-created” the product with their customers. Now, they’re seeking partnerships with industrial chambers, commercial chambers, and fractional CFOs in the southern U.S. to reach a broader range of customers.
The company is also seeking more businesses to utilize the Compass benchmarking tool to generate greater insights. Overall, Sepulveda is looking forward to more traction
“We want to prioritize meeting the actual customer to the extent that they are able to stay with us for a long time.”
