Monarch, a San Francisco-based personal finance startup, has raised $75 million in a funding round aimed at accelerating subscriber growth. The company experienced a surge in users last year when Intuit shut down its budgeting tool, Mint. The funding values Monarch at $850 million, according to co-founder Val Agostino.
“Managing your money is one of the big unsolved problems in consumer technology,” Agostino said in a recent Zoom interview. How American families manage their money is still largely the same as it was in the late 1990s, except that today we do it on our phones instead of walking into a bank.
Monarch, founded in 2018, relies on paying subscribers, allowing the company to avoid focusing on advertising from credit-card issuers or selling users’ data. Agostino, who was an early product manager at Mint, emphasized the ease of onboarding accounts and expense tracking with Monarch compared to rival tools.
FPV co-founder Chan compared Monarch to his previous investments, citing Monarch’s innovative approach in a challenging market.
Monarch’s growth amid fintech slowdown
What Val is doing is the successor to anything that’s been done in financial planning,” Chan said.
“It’s frictionless, it’s easy to use, and it’s easy to share, which is something that never existed before. That’s why he’s growing so quickly and why the engagement numbers are so high.”
This round of funding comes at a time when interest in U.S. fintech companies catering directly to consumers is reduced. Monarch is one of the few firms to raise a sizeable Series B in recent times.
Fintech firms raised $1.9 billion in venture funding in the first quarter, a 38% decline from the previous quarter, signaling deepening investor caution towards B2C models, according to a recent PitchBook report. The sector is still in nuclear winter,” Chan noted, referencing the challenges faced by the industry due to startups that raised significant capital without making progress. “That’s fine with me, I love nuclear-winter sectors.”
Monarch’s recent success highlights the continuing evolution and challenges in the personal finance sector, underscoring the company’s unique positioning and growth strategy during a challenging time for consumer-facing fintech startups.
