Mesh, CashIO, Meshly.ai and VirtuSpect were named the winners of the 2025 CFO Leadership Finance and Accounting Technology Expo Pitch Stage competition, for the categories of Core Finance Tech Stack, Business Intelligence and Automation, Productivity Tools, and Disruptive Platforms and Tools respectively.
“Let’s face it,” said Mary McKenna, emcee of the competition, former tech CFO and angel investor. “Startups are the people that start the things in the economy. If you don’t support them, you won’t have the big companies.”
Startups from across the globe applied to pitch their product or service to the expo’s audience of venture capitalists, angel investors, entrepreneurs and potential customers such as CFOs, VPs of finance and other finance professionals. Sixteen finalists were selected to present to a panel of judges at the Jacob Javits convention center in New York City.
“Winning FATE’s pitch competition is one of the biggest highlights for Mesh this year,” said Erin Kim, co-founder and CEO of Mesh, a fully AI-native bookkeeping service. “Getting the chance to present and connect with CFOs around the world to solve their month-end close is truly a gift for a young startup like ours.”
“We’re extremely honored to receive this award,” said Tim Harris, CEO and co-founder of VirtuSpect, a software platform that helps automate and centralize the inspection process. “It confirms that our vision and execution hit where the market’s heading.”
Artificial intelligence was the hot topic throughout the entire expo; all four winners have the technology involved in one aspect or another of their products. VirtuSpect uses AI to flag discrepancies during inspections, and for image authentication and measurement to maintain data integrity and compliance.
The “smoke detector of revenue,” Meshly is building a platform to keep GTM systems like CRM, contracts and billing in sync, so teams don’t make decisions off mismatched data; AI is the one flagging patterns that may be risky. CashIO promises to help accounting firms and fractional CFOs scale with AI; it’s a CAS-enablement platform covering everything from period close through to forecasts and advisory outputs.
On the horizon, Kim is looking at “onboard[ing] more innovative accounting teams onto our vendor accruals agent and expanding our product suite to cover other underserved month-end tasks like prepaid expenses.”
While they currently focused on those in highly regulated industries, like banks and insurance companies, Harris is “moving beyond financial services into new verticals where efficiently proving compliance is critical.”
“This was our first-ever pitch competition and we won!” said Alex Ruddock, founder and CEO at CashIO. “We think it’s a strong signal that we’re on the right track. Next up, we’re focused on onboarding new firms and kicking off our pre-seed round in January ’26.”
