Good morning. CFOs are increasingly involved in AI strategy. For Seun Sodipo, CFO at Plaid, the fintech startup that connects financial institutions, her coding experience has become a foundation for experimenting with large language models and AI.
“AI in its best form, should be an accelerant to a business achieving their goals,” said Sodipo, who has a degree in applied mathematics, an MBA, and has worked at Stripe, Glossier, as well as stints in investment banking and private equity before joining Plaid as finance chief last October.
Plaid, led by co-founder and CEO Zachary Perret, connects consumers’ financial accounts to third-party apps and services, providing infrastructure that powers a range of fintech apps, including payments and money-management tools like Venmo. In April 2025, Plaid completed a $575 million funding round led by Franklin Templeton that valued the company at about $6.1 billion. After Visa’s acquisition of Plaid fell through in 2021, the company continued operating independently.
In February 2026, Plaid reached an $8 billion valuation, marking a 31% increase from the prior year. The fundraising was structured as a secondary share sale, allowing long-standing employees to cash out equity rather than raising fresh capital for the company’s balance sheet. AI as an accelerant
More than 400 AI companies now build on its infrastructure, according to Plaid, representing 20% of new customers in 2025. Management’s view is that the company is becoming the foundational infrastructure for an AI-native financial system.
For her own work as CFO, Sodipo uses AI in practical ways: reclaiming time, preparing for meetings, organizing her week, and thinking through problems. But one of the most valuable uses, she said, is as a sounding board.
“I use AI a lot as a thought partner,” she said. Sodipo uses AI to “game plan,” ask it to challenge her assumptions, poke holes in her arguments, and identify blind spots. For a CFO, that can be especially useful because the role requires balancing strategy, risk, financial discipline, and trust.
“Our team is wonderful and collaborative, but there’s just certain things that within the role I have to keep to myself,” she said.
She has also experimented with using AI to build dashboards and query information. That part has been less intuitive, she said, because she learned to work directly with coding languages and SQL.
“It’s been really interesting to try and transition to a natural language query,” she said.
Sodipo grew up in Nigeria and the U.K. in a family of entrepreneurs. “From a very young age, dinner table conversation was business,” she said.
In 2025, Plaid exceeded all of its financial expectations, Sodipo said. It surpassed $500 million in ARR in Q4 2025, with revenue growing nearly 40% year over year. Plaid signed about 1,800 new enterprise customers last year. AI’s expanding role in finance Plaid’s bet is that as consumers increasingly turn to AI tools to navigate their daily lives, they will also want those tools to help manage their finances. Plaid’s recent “State of Intelligent Finance” report found that more than half of Americans used AI for financial tasks in the past 12 months, and among those users, 86% said it helped them better understand their finances. Advice becomes more valuable, Sodipo said, when it is anchored in consumers’ own consent-based financial data.
The company is also using AI internally. Sodipo sees it as an accelerant for teams across finance, legal, and research and development. Sodipo said employees regularly experiment with AI in their spare time, sharing prototypes in an internal AI Slack channel.
“You do your Monday morning check in, and people are so excited to share what they’ve built over the weekend with AI,” she said.
Teams have built bots that answer recurring Slack questions, summarize tasks and emails, and support scenario planning. In one case, a finance employee used AI tools to run 2,000 Monte Carlo simulations without relying on a data engineer or data scientist. That technique predicts possible outcomes of uncertain events by running thousands of “what-if” scenarios using random sampling.
For Sodipo, that is the larger promise of AI at Plaid: not simply doing existing work faster, but improving the products the company delivers. “I love being in the details,” she said. Sheryl Estrada [email protected]
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