CentSight: providing small businesses CFO clarity for less from Ohio

Gerald Hetrick has spent enough time in boardrooms over the years to recognize a particular kind of silence: a founder is asked a routine question about their own numbers, and they struggle to answer — not because they don't know their customers, product or market, but because the financial data underneath is written in a language many may be unsure how to interpret.

That gap is the premise of CentSight, the Lakewood, Cleveland-based company Hetrick and his team launched publicly last week, with the help of $1.5 million in pre-seed funding from Detroit’s Mudita Venture Partners. CentSight bills itself as an AI-native financial intelligence platform for small and mid-sized businesses. It provides, they say, business owners with CFO-grade clarity without the cost of an actual CFO. 

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The fluency, not data problem

Most owners aren't short on data, Hetrick argues. They have bank accounts, accounting systems, spreadsheets, reports, and advisors. What they're missing is a clear answer at the moment a decision has to be made. "Small business leaders struggle to make decisions really quickly and really efficiently," he told us in an interview. The price of that hesitation can be, he says "they make decisions too late, and they see the opportunity that they were facing as a crisis."

Hetrick previously founded HR onboarding platform Able - acquired by recruiting-software company Bullhorn in 2023 - and is careful about how he names the deficit in knowledge in business finance. "I don't think it's so much of a knowledge gap," he said. "It's definitely a wisdom gap, but it's not an intelligence gap. It's more about giving enterprise-grade clarity to SMB leaders, which makes them more confident." Enterprise companies solved this years ago by surrounding the decision-maker with a C-suite; but the founder of a fifty-person manufacturer or am early-stage startup rarely has that access, and often can't justify the cost of renting it.

The product is intended to stand in for that expertise. CentSight connects to QuickBooks Online and to bank accounts through Plaid, then lets owners ask questions about cash flow, expenses, margins, and runway in plain English, receiving answers with the underlying numbers attached, according to the company. An alert system the company calls ‘Signals’ watches the connected data for the things owners tend to notice too late - a cash gap forming in the coming weeks, a customer slipping behind on payment, a vendor category creeping up, a margin narrowing - and surfaces them before anyone thinks to ask. It leans on an artificial intelligence layer that has made this kind of always-on monitoring possible for a small business at all, and is yet another example of fintech tooling increasingly targeting small businesses.

The company shared industry estimates that fractional CFO advisory services can run from $3,000 to more than $18,000 a month; figures that price most of the roughly 36 million U.S. small businesses out of the strategic finance help that larger companies take for granted. "The whole idea is to run your company on answers, not anxiety," Hetrick says in the launch announcement.

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The $1.5 million launch round

At $1.5 million from a single fund, CentSight's raise is large by Midwest pre-seed standards. Early rounds here are more often stitched together from several smaller checks than written as one, as our latest funding data for his home state of Ohio shows. 

But CentSight wasn't built the conventional way and then funded. It was built inside Mudita Studios, the VC firm's company-creation engine, and the capital arrived with the launch rather than out of a competitive process. "This wasn't a round that we took to market and said, 'Hey, we're raising a seed round,'" Hetrick tells us. He went full-time on the idea in the fourth quarter of 2025, working with the studio on the concept; while the business itself launched on January 1, 2026, and the app went live publicly just a couple of weeks ago, on June 22.

But he confirms that a more ‘conventional’ seed round is still ahead for the business. "We will go raise a real round of capital later this year or early next year, in which we will take it to market," 

From the studio's side, the bet is on timing and on the founder. "Business owners do not need another spreadsheet or static dashboard," said Sandy Schwartz, Managing Partner at Mudita Venture Partners, in the announcement. "They need trusted, real time financial intelligence that helps them make better decisions faster." 

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Why Cleveland, and the gap underneath

The pull to leave the region has been real for Hetrick in the past. Pitching Able years ago, he took a term sheet from a large West Coast VC at what he calls a great valuation — on the condition that he move himself and the company to the Bay Area. He stayed, building in Cleveland for roughly 15 years, and says he has turned down offers as recently as last year that would have had him leading a company headquartered somewhere else.

His reasons are bound up in who he thinks his first customers are. "When I think about the Midwest, and particularly Cleveland and Northeast Ohio, I think about a massive sprawl of SMBs," he said. "Just the heartbeat of it, the backbone of the economy of America" He’s describing the companies CentSight is aimed at, and living and working among them, he argues, is an advantage rather than a compromise. As an example, on the day we spoke he was running three product demos, one of them near Chicago, all with people whose problems and backgrounds mirror his own.

Our region's small businesses are its economic backbone, but the early-stage capital to build the tools those businesses need has stayed thin, and a founder who can raise it locally is still the exception rather than the rule. "We're not going to turn Cleveland into Austin, or the Peninsula, or Boston overnight," he tells us. "But if some people don't take the shot, it'll never happen." He doesn't claim CentSight will be the company that closes that gap on its own, but argues more people need to take a shot at it: “We need people to take those risks here in these Midwestern cities for us to flip the value gap the region has upside down."

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