Accion Venture Lab, a seed stage investment vehicle for financial inclusion firm Accion, has sold its stake in Varthana; Varthana provides specialized loans and services so people in India can afford to attend private schools; Accion Venture Lab's first investment into Varthana was in 2013; Varthana recently raised $14 million in the spring of 2016. Source
Vikas Raj, Managing Director at Accion Venture Lab, sat down with the TearSheet Podcast to talk about the firm’s portfolio...
For example, Allbirds advertises that buyers can save up to $35 with the brand if shopping through Accrue. Let’s focus on a specific product: Allbirds women’s wool runners. The shoes are advertised for $98 on Accrue, with a $10 cash reward for a customer who is just setting up an account.
Save now, pay later capability as an embedded e-commerce service is Accrue Savings' response to the waves of credit forced on consumers.
A study conducted by AI tax solution, April, found that understanding the system was more of an issue for taxpayers than time spent filing.
Acorns is a US micro-investing app that invests spare change in ETFs; it has announced the appointment of former Wealthfront CEO, Adam Nash, to its board of directors; the firm also says it is researching behavioral economics as part of its marketing strategy and has added Shlomo Benartzi, professor and co-chair of the Behavioral Decision-Making Group at the University of California, Los Angeles, to its board. Source
In an interview with Business Insider Acorns CEO Noah Kerner talked about the investment app’s success to date and how he see the company moving forward; the company has seen strong growth with 2.2 million US accounts; the app allows users to invest spare change from purchases; the focus of the future is to try to get all households with income under $100K using the app. Source.
Most financial services firms look to educate users by having a blog or providing some links to resources; Acorns CEO Noah Kerner says the company wants to go further, they have their own online magazine, interviews with celebrities and provide financial how tos; they will also push content to you based upon how you use the app, trying to customize your experience; the big difference they see is when they combine education with the app experience, helping to move education beyond just reading articles. Source.
Acorns has partnered with personal financial management app Clarity Money; Acorns now has two million investment accounts with users investing spare change into customized investments; Clarity Money launched in 2016 and is an app for personal finance advice and expense and savings management; users of both platforms benefit from the partnership with Clarity Money customers able to use Acorns' automated investing features and Acorns' investors able to sync their Acorns investment account to their Clarity Money dashboard. Source
Savings and investing app Acorns has raised $300 million in a Series F funding round that values the company at nearly $2 billion. The announcement of the raise comes about six weeks after the consumer fintech startup said it was shelving its plans for its $2.2 billion SPAC with Pioneer Merger Corp. in favor of […]