After Trace was acquired in Dec 2023, I used AI endlessly for two things: managing my own portfolio and prototyping startup ideas. I planned to go back to finance and build an AI product for CFOs.
September 2026
BenchmarkAI began as a personal project. I’ve built financial systems at Facebook, led finance at Zenefits, and founded Trace, a software company acquired by Paylocity. Now I’m bringing that experience to my first love: markets and investing.
The test
We started by building a benchmark of the frontier models. We wanted to know which models were best at investing. I already had a prompt library for investing tasks that I’d copy and paste across Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Grok. Putting the models in competition against each other and the S&P 500 would teach us the most.
Development
In the summer of 2025, reasoning agents became good enough to build real systems on. First came the foundational data infrastructure – pipelines, workflows, and agents.
The research launch
On December 1, 2025, we launched four AI investment teams in simulation, one per frontier model. Each ran three strategies.
A month in, I realized how lucky I was to be working on a problem I was obsessed with and doing what I loved. The benchmarking project became the business.
BenchmarkAI is an AI-native research and investment firm – its first fund is in formation. We use competing frontier models within one governed investment system to research and construct U.S. equity portfolios.
Here’s how it works:
- Every day, agents research the market, assess their portfolio, and think about strategy. A cadence determines when they’re allowed to make portfolio changes.
- Our code does the deterministic work: analytics, tools, and orchestration.
- Every decision links back to the research behind it. We approve the move to rebalancing, check that portfolio changes are processed correctly, and resolve operational issues. Investment judgment remains with the model.
Focus
- U.S. equities, long only
- No leverage
- No options
- No prediction markets
The questions I care most about are still open.
What knobs and dials do we really control? Our agents recommend changes to the systems they run inside – when we adopt one, can we tell what it moved? And how much further can we push an agent: more time to think, more agents working beneath it?
We named our prior software company, Trace, because we wanted to help CFOs track every investment from their budget to actuals. With BenchmarkAI, we’re on a similar pursuit to understand how AI traces to investment objectives.
The mission
Managing other people’s money is a responsibility I don’t take lightly. I can’t promise a result. I can promise that we’ll make well-reasoned decisions, work extremely hard, and communicate clearly and consistently.
Mike Gonzalez
The founder
At the Kelley School of Business, I studied finance and IT. I thought I was getting my start in “management consulting.” Really, I was building Oracle systems for Fortune 500 FP&A leaders – GE, Simon Property, Quanta Services, and my first client, TIAA-CREF, which brought me back every quarter to help run its planning cycle.
From there, I joined Facebook to partner with FP&A leaders to build and manage their planning and long-range forecasting systems. I wanted to run finance, not build systems for the people who did – so I left Facebook and joined the FP&A team at Zenefits, then one of the fastest-growing software companies of its era.
Zenefits
I worked closely with David Sacks, and when he took over as CEO he put me on the executive team to lead finance. I was 27, and I led a restructuring of a business that grew from 600 to 1,600 employees in a year and needed to figure out margins. Zenefits taught me two important things. First, I loved the chaos of startups, but wanted to own the decisions. Second, enterprise software lagged behind what I’d known at Facebook, and our teams suffered.
Trace
That gap became Trace – a tool to put finance and business teams on the same page about how a company spends. We were the system behind procurement and headcount planning for leading enterprise businesses. I made first-time-founder mistakes: we took on too much product and had complex cross-functional sales cycles. We weren’t ready for growth funding, but the business became the foundation for Paylocity’s move into the Office of the CFO.
Paylocity
I led our product division there for a year, and after our $325M acquisition of Airbase, we had a complete financial suite.
Indiana
It was rough where I grew up in Northwest Indiana, but I had smart, hard-working parents who were equal parts demanding and supportive. We’ve always been a tight-knit family, so when I sold Trace, the first thing I did was fund an investment account for every child in our family tree.
Back in 2018, when we founded Trace, we dreamed of a Salesforce-style giving program to fund investment accounts for underprivileged children. When Invest America was introduced in 2020 – an investment account for every American child – it was exactly the idea we’d hoped for.
Now that it’s live, CFO AI, Inc., dba BenchmarkAI, intends to donate 3% of net revenue to fund Invest America accounts.