Michael Fajardo (MBA ’20) founded Porter, an AI-powered finance platform designed to lighten the financial workload for startups and small businesses.
Darden Alum’s AI Finance Platform Lightens the Load for Startups and Small Businesses
16 July 2026
Alumni News / Artificial Intelligence, Careers
By Caroline Mackey
Before Porter was an AI finance company, it was a name with two meanings.
For Michael Fajardo (MBA ’20), the word is a nod first to Michael Porter, the strategist whose Five Forces framework he studied at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. But it also meant something simpler: a person who carries the bags, lightens the load and helps someone keep moving.
That is, in many ways, what Fajardo is trying to build for founders. His company, Porter, is designed to help startups and small and medium-sized businesses stop treating finance as a burdensome hassle and start seeing it as a tool for growth.
“We’re building AI finance teams for startups and SMBs,” Fajardo said. “Every company, once it gets to a certain stage, hires a finance team. But for a lot of early-stage startups and small and medium-sized businesses, finance is treated as a compliance headache.”
Fajardo, a member of the Darden Class of 2020, saw that problem firsthand before launching Porter. After Darden, he worked in restructuring and startups, eventually becoming head of operations and finance at Lev, a PropTech company. With shifts in the business and the overall market, he found himself running operations and finance largely on his own.
The experience forced him to learn quickly, automate where he could and build systems that made it possible to manage work that had once been spread across a larger team. It also helped him see a broader opportunity.
If he could build those systems for one company, he thought, maybe he could do it for many others.
At first, the idea was to “productize” the playbooks he had built at Lev. Over time, Fajardo narrowed the focus to finance, where he saw early-stage companies facing the same set of imperfect choices: struggle through accounting software built for accountants, outsource to providers who may not have deep context about the business or hire an in-house finance team before the company is ready for that expense.
Porter is meant to offer another option: enterprise-grade finance support at a fraction of the cost.
Founding the company also marks a full-circle moment for Fajardo. In 2018, he was featured as the inaugural recipient of the Darden Philippines Scholarship. At the time, he spoke about wanting to start a business someday. Like many MBA students, though, the path from saying that out loud to actually doing it was not immediate.
“Back then, it was just a dream,” Fajardo said. “I said in that interview that I wanted to start my own business, but in reality, most people go to business school and they go into consulting and investment banking. And I did that.”
Still, the idea of entrepreneurship stayed with him.
Porter began with prototypes built using no-code AI tools. Fajardo later met his co-founder through Y Combinator’s co-founder matching platform, and one of the company’s early customers was his former employer, Lev. Porter now has four paying customers and has closed its pre-seed fundraising process.
Those milestones have made the company feel more real, but Fajardo said founding a company still requires getting comfortable with uncertainty.
“The hardest part about this journey is actually just making that decision to pursue it,” he said.
That has been one of the biggest lessons of building Porter. Fajardo said he used to prefer having a complete plan and thinking through everything that could go wrong before taking a step. As a founder, he has had to learn to move before every answer is clear.
Darden helped prepare him for that in ways he did not necessarily expect. Fajardo arrived with a finance background and had studied business as an undergraduate, but he said the most valuable part of his MBA experience was developing his soft skills and people skills.
Recruiting, networking, attending events and building relationships all pushed him to grow as a communicator and leader. Those skills now shape the way he works with customers, builds a team and explains the company’s vision.
Today, Fajardo hopes Porter can help founders and business owners feel more connected to their finances. The goal is to make finance less intimidating and more useful to the people trying to build and grow companies.
“We could potentially help thousands, if not millions, of startups and small businesses think of finance more as a growth lever for their business,” he said.
For current Darden students interested in entrepreneurship, Fajardo’s advice is not to worry if the path does not look perfectly direct. There are student loans, career considerations and plenty of reasons why starting a company may not be the first step after business school.
But that does not mean the dream has to disappear.
“You don’t really need a grand plan,” Fajardo said. “You just need to dream something, aim at something — it could be anything, big or small — but just make sure that you’re moving toward it.”
About the University of Virginia Darden School of Business
The University of Virginia Darden School of Business prepares responsible global leaders through unparalleled transformational learning experiences. Darden’s graduate degree programs (Full-Time MBA, Part-Time MBA, Executive MBA, MSBA and Ph.D.) and Executive Education & Lifelong Learning programs offered by the Darden School Foundation set the stage for a lifetime of career advancement and impact. Darden’s top-ranked faculty, renowned for teaching excellence, inspires and shapes modern business leadership worldwide through research, thought leadership and business publishing. Darden has Grounds in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the Washington, D.C., area and a global community that includes 20,000 alumni in 90 countries. Darden was established in 1955 at the University of Virginia, a top public university founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819 in Charlottesville, Virginia.
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