The Firm
The Oakworth Group is a financial infrastructure advisory firm. The firm builds the financial infrastructure that early and growth stage companies need and that institutional investors, boards, and strategic partners expect to see.
The firms that can build institutional-grade financial infrastructure are positioned for companies at a scale that most early stage companies have not yet reached. The firms that serve early stage companies rarely build to institutional standard. The Oakworth Group occupies this gap by applying structured analytical discipline from institutional financial environments to companies that are building the infrastructure those environments require.
Every engagement is structured against the Founder Financial Infrastructure Standard, an open compliance framework defining the financial infrastructure requirements across seven domains and three compliance levels. The Standard governs the assessment of what the company has, the definition of what the company needs, and the measurement of the work completed. Oakworth does not assess by professional judgment alone. It assesses against published, citable criteria.
The firm serves companies from Inception through Scale Stage across seven sectors: Fintech, SaaS and Enterprise Software, AI and Machine Learning, Healthcare and HealthTech, Climate Tech and Clean Energy, Deep Tech and Hardware, and Consumer and eCommerce. Engagements are structured around five service layers, each corresponding to a stage of financial infrastructure development.
The Team
The Oakworth Group's professionals bring structured analytical training from institutional financial environments to startup scale financial infrastructure. The work is precise, methodological, and governed by the FFI Standard's compliance criteria. The firm's analysts and advisors have operated across debt capital markets, structured finance, private equity, and venture advisory before applying that discipline to the financial infrastructure challenges of early and growth stage companies.
Governing Methodology
Oakworth structures every engagement against the Founder Financial Infrastructure Standard. The Standard defines the compliance criteria that govern the assessment and the deliverables. When the firm identifies a gap in a company's financial infrastructure, that gap is measured against the Standard's published requirements for the relevant domain and compliance level. When the firm delivers a financial model, that model is built to the Standard's specifications for the relevant layer.
The Standard is published at https://ffistandard.org under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International and is available to use, cite, and adapt without restriction.
Selected Outcomes
The company's financial model consisted of a single revenue projection with no cost structure separation, no headcount model, and no scenario analysis. Oakworth rebuilt the model to a fully integrated three statement structure with a documented assumption layer, a driver based revenue forecast calibrated to the company's sales cycle, and three internally consistent scenarios. The financial data room was prepared to Level 2 compliance. The Series A process closed in fourteen weeks from data room opening.
The company had issued four SAFE notes across two rounds with different valuation caps and discount rates. The instruments had not been modeled on a fully diluted basis and the cap table did not reflect the option pool established at incorporation. Oakworth built a fully diluted cap table incorporating all issued instruments at both cap based and discount based conversion prices, established the option pool governance documentation, and produced a waterfall analysis across fifteen exit scenarios. The company completed a priced Seed round within four months.
Following a Series A close, the company had no formal operating plan and no management accounts structure. Board reporting consisted of monthly revenue figures shared by email. Oakworth built a twelve month annual operating plan approved by the board, departmental budgets with a fully loaded headcount model, and a management accounts structure producing reports within fifteen business days of each period end. The first board pack under the new structure was delivered in the third month following engagement completion.
Engagements begin with the Blueprint Diagnostic.
Blueprint Diagnostic →