About COVU
COVU is building the AI-native operating stack for insurance distribution — combining software, services, markets, and capital. We partner with, operate, and acquire independent insurance agencies to turn fragmented service businesses into a scalable platform with data, automation, and product at the core.
The Role
We’re hiring a CFO to own COVU’s full financial system — and to actively drive our next chapter: scaling acquisitions, building a durable capital strategy, and making business performance predictable.
The CFO will own capital planning across debt and equity, support the CEO in equity fundraising, and build the operating visibility needed to scale with discipline.
The CFO is also the economic architect of COVU’s AI-native operating model. This role ensures capital deployment, automation, service quality, and margin expansion reinforce one another. The CFO co-owns the metrics, instrumentation, and financial guardrails that protect and scale Margin-Positive Customer Experience — ensuring growth never degrades trust, service standards, or operating leverage. This role is for a CFO who can operate in the details (close, controls, unit economics, working capital) and also lead at the highest level (capital strategy, lender/investor narrative, M&A underwriting, board/audit leadership).
Responsibilities
1) Capital Strategy & Financing (Debt + Equity)
- Own capital strategy and planning: determine the optimal balance of debt vs. equity to support acquisitions and operating needs.
- Lead debt financing strategy and execution: warehouse lines, senior secured facilities, acquisition financing, working capital structures, and other credit products.
- Build and own lender materials: credit story, collateral and covenant proposals, portfolio performance reporting, and diligence packages.
- Support the CEO in equity fundraising: investor materials, fundraising strategy, diligence readiness, and investor communications.
- Own liquidity planning, capital allocation, and covenant/compliance governance.
- Establish explicit capital deployment guardrails and gating criteria: no acquisition, debt expansion, or growth acceleration without integration capacity, workflow-level margin visibility, and customer experience protection metrics in place.
2) Business Predictability, FP&A, and Executive Dashboards (No Surprises)
- Build an FP&A function that drives predictable performance: budget, forecast, scenario planning, and weekly/monthly operating cadence.
- Provide executive management and the board with a dashboard of leading business indicators (not just lagging financials), highlighting trends, risks, and opportunities early.
- Create an operating rhythm where performance becomes measurable, explainable, and devoid of surprises.
- Own unit economics, cohort and margin analysis, and acquisition ROI tracking.
- Develop workflow-level cost-to-serve baselines and automation ROI models that quantify AI-driven leverage.
- Partner with Product and Operations to ensure service quality, automation adoption, and margin expansion are measured in an integrated system — not in silos.
3) M&A Finance — Underwrite, Buy, Validate (Post-Close Discipline)
- Own the financial model for acquisitions: valuation, deal structure, earnouts, downside cases, and synergy realization.
- Partner with CEO / Corp Dev on LOIs, deal terms, purchase accounting readiness, and integration milestones.
- Build acquisition performance systems: cohort tracking, retention, margin expansion, cross-sell, and integration KPI dashboards.
- Establish 30/60/90-day post-close economic validation frameworks to ensure underwriting assumptions translate into realized margin and service outcomes.
- Implement an acquisition gating process if integration capacity or CX performance is compromised.
4) Financial Operations & Controls (Multi-Entity)
- Own accounting, treasury, tax, audit readiness, and internal controls across a growing multi-entity structure.
- Implement month-end close discipline, chart of accounts, cost center structure, and management reporting that scales.
- Build working capital management aligned with brokerage realities (commissions, carrier payables, premium flows where applicable).
- Strengthen procurement/spend controls and financial governance without slowing execution.
- Ensure finance data pipelines (commissions, carrier payables, premium flows, automation tracking) are treated as core infrastructure and integrated with operating systems. Finance must operate as a near-real-time decision engine, not a lagging reporting function.
5) Audit Leadership & Board Interface
- Lead the annual financial audit end-to-end.
- Serve as the primary interface to the audit partner and the audit committee of the board, ensuring readiness, clean execution, and strong controls.
- Own audit committee reporting, accounting policy decisions, and financial risk oversight.
6) Brokerage Economics, Risk, and Durability
- Master insurance distribution economics: commission and fee revenue, contingents (where applicable), chargebacks, premium/commission timing, and operational cost drivers.
- Build reporting that ties financial performance to real operating workflows and service capacity.
- Support leadership in evaluating carrier/program economics and the financial implications of appointment strategy and portfolio mix.
- Quantify carrier concentration risk, contingent revenue exposure, premium timing volatility, and chargeback dynamics to protect balance sheet durability and covenant resilience as leverage increases.
7) Leadership, Culture, and Executive Partnership
- Be the CEO’s strategic partner on planning, risk, capital allocation, and tradeoffs.
- Lead board-level financial reporting and narrative: KPIs, forecasts, scenario planning, and capital strategy.
- Build and lead the finance organization: hiring, development, and cross-functional operating cadence.
- Build financial literacy across operating pods and product teams so leaders understand the economic drivers of automation, service capacity, customer retention, and margin. Finance should elevate decision quality across the organization.
- Establish decision forums and governance (e.g., operating reviews, capital/deal gating mechanisms) that increase speed and decision quality simultaneously.
What Success Looks Like (First 6–12 Months)
- A capital plan is in place that clearly defines when we use debt vs. equity and why; debt facilities are closed and operational with a clean reporting cadence.
- Executive + board dashboards of leading indicators are live; forecast accuracy improves materially; surprises reduce sharply.
- Margin-Positive Customer Experience is measurable and improving across major books of business.
- Workflow-level cost-to-serve baselines exist; AI-driven cost-to-serve reductions are visible and validated.
- M&A underwriting + acquisition scorecard are standardized; 30/60/90 post-close validation is embedded; integration performance is tracked and managed tightly.
- Close, controls, and audit readiness are predictable; audit runs smoothly with strong governance.
- Debt providers and board members trust operating data as decision-grade infrastructure.
Ideal Background
Required
- 12–20+ years in finance leadership, including senior ownership of FP&A + accounting + capital strategy.
- Proven experience leading debt financing processes and negotiating with lenders.
- Experience supporting equity fundraising (materials, diligence readiness, investor narrative).
- Strong M&A finance experience: underwriting, deal structuring, and post-close performance management.
- Ability to build scalable finance systems: reporting, controls, forecasting, KPIs, and team.
- High integrity, strong judgment, and operational rigor.
Strongly Preferred
- Experience in insurance brokerage, fintech-enabled services, roll-ups, or multi-entity regulated businesses.
- Experience with credit products tied to cash-flowing portfolios (senior secured, asset-backed, warehouse facilities, etc.).
- Demonstrated experience tying automation, service quality, and financial outcomes together in a technology-enabled services or operational platform environment.
- Proven willingness to say “no” to growth or capital deployment when operating leverage, integration capacity, or CX readiness is insufficient.
- Track record partnering with operators (not just reporting after the fact).
- Comfort operating in ambiguity and moving fast with high accountability.
Operating Style (How We Work)
- Low ego, high standards, high velocity.
- Can zoom from lender negotiations to close/audit details without losing the thread.
- Uses finance to enable execution — not slow it down.
- Builds simple, durable systems that increase speed and reduce risk.
Why Join COVU
- Real mandate + leverage: Own capital strategy end-to-end with direct impact on company scale and pace.
- Platform at an inflection point: Proven acquisition + operating improvement engine; now institutionalizing finance and unlocking repeatable leverage.
- Meaningful upside: Competitive salary, performance-based bonus, and significant equity tied to long-term value creation.
- AI-native execution, not AI theater: AI embedded in workflows to drive measurable outcomes: speed, quality, margin, and consistency.
- High-agency environment: Work directly with the CEO and leadership team; decisions move fast and accountability is real.
- Institutionally financeable platform: Building reporting, controls, underwriting discipline, and operating rigor that earns lender and investor confidence.
Location
San Francisco or Los Angeles (in-office / hybrid)
Compensation
Competitive base + performance-based bonus + meaningful equity tied to capital execution, predictability of performance, and acquisition outcomes.
