Next Generation of AI Literacy Finds Success in Hard Work

A lot of high schoolers doodle in class, and Dom Carfagno was no different as he sat in his sophomore English class at La Salle College High School outside Philadelphia in 2023. But Carfagno wasn’t doodling to pass the time; he was trying to come up with the name for his AI startup. It wasn’t until he went through the entire alphabet, however, that he hit upon Zom AI, which hopes to make “high-quality financial intelligence universal,” to quote its motto.

Now, with a half-million dollars in startup funding at the ripe old age of 19, Carfagno hopes to greatly improve the advice and productivity of financial advisers by synthesizing all a client’s data from the firm’s own systems into one secure unified view.

“Zom AI turns scattered data into intelligence the adviser can act on,” says Carfagno, who started investing at 15 years old and founded La Salle’s first student-managed investment fund. “Nothing is sent, recommended or acted on without their approval. The goal is to help the firm grow revenue per adviser, retain more clients, free up adviser capacity and improve profitability over time.”

Next Generation

That might sound ambitious for someone who is not even a sophomore at the College yet, but the professors who know him in the School of Business, where he’s majoring in finance, aren’t a bit surprised.

“He is one of the most prepared and sharp students I have ever met in over 25 years of teaching,” says David Wyman, associate professor of entrepreneurship.

Not only is he the first first-year student to win CofC’s Student Entrepreneur of the Year award, but he is also a “terrific” mentor in the Honors College Entrepreneurship Living-Learning Community, says director Lancie Affonso ’96 (M.S. ’08), Honors College faculty fellow and senior instructor of computer science, management and marketing.

“Dom’s vision for lifelong learning and entrepreneurship makes him a compelling example of the next generation of AI-literate student-entrepreneurs at the College,” Affonso notes. “Rather than treating college and startup work as competing priorities, he effectively bridges the two by applying entrepreneurial theory in practice through his venture, Zom AI.”

Carfagno had planned on attending the University of Miami but changed his mind after a visit to the College, where his brother, Luca Carfagno, is a rising senior majoring in commercial real estate finance.

“I thought that I would need somebody I could kind of lean on, but I actually didn’t end up seeing Luca once the whole first semester,” Carfagno says. “I love Charleston. It was definitely the best decision for me for school. It’s been awesome.”

Profitable Investment

Prodded by curiosity and money he saved from small ventures like a trash can–cleaning company, Carfagno has already made more than six figures with his investments. In high school, he became fascinated by Jim Simons of the Medallion Fund, a legendary, algorithm-driven hedge fund widely considered the most profitable fund in history.

“He took a very different approach to investing,” Carfagno says. “It kind of goes against what everybody says about investing, and I wanted to learn more.”

At the same time, AI chatbots like ChatGPT were coming out, but they are closed models, meaning you can only talk to them on the large language model they were trained on.

“Very few of them had access to even search the web to get external data,” explains Carfagno, “and so I was like, What if I could just connect my portfolio to these chatbots to be able to ask questions and learn about my portfolio and be able to build these cool investment strategies? That’s how Zom essentially started.”

Putting his gains to work, he hired a La Salle tech-office classmate to code a prototype, which he integrated with a finance connectivity layer called Plaid that Venmo and many banks use.

With help and encouragement from his business teachers at La Salle and his dad, an oil and gas executive who connected him with compliance lawyers, he pivoted to a B2B version before ever releasing it, because only registered financial advisers can supply investing advice – but, in doing so, Carfagno discovered a real gap.

“It’s very hard for an advisory team to hold every client’s portfolios, taxes and family situation in depth at the same time,” he says. “It takes an enormous amount of hours, no matter how many people you hire. That’s what an operating intelligence layer changes. It lets a smaller firm take on more clients, cover every one of them properly and grow without adding overhead.”

Steady Drive

That’s possible in part because Zom works in partnership with Anthropic’s Claude AI models, which are the industry gold standard.

Right now several firms are beta-testing Zom, and Carfagno says it’s been a game changer for them thanks to the “business intelligence” it provides. Zom has shown so much promise that Carfagno even turned down a spot in one of the world’s biggest startup accelerators.

But don’t think for one minute that his success is due to some kind of tech wizardry or luck. It comes from putting in long hours and assembling a great team.

“There are companies that have a lot more bandwidth in terms of people than us, a lot more funding than us, a lot more experience than us – and so the only variable is literally just working every single waking hour,” says Carfagno. “Everybody has this belief that it’s very easy to do, and it’s not.

“At the end of the day, nothing is going to beat hard work,” he adds. “There’s no get-rich-quick scheme, or at least I haven’t found it yet. It just comes down to hard work.”