App for personal finances Despite finance businesses experiencing a "nuclear winter," Monarch raises $75 million

 

According to CNBC, Monarch, a personal finance firm, has raised $75 million to boost subscriber growth that began last year after Mint, a budgeting application, was shut down.

Co-founder Val Agostino estimates the San Francisco-based company is worth $850 million, making the fundraising one of the biggest for an American consumer fintech startup this year. Forerunner Ventures and FPV Ventures led the Series B investment.

Monarch wants to offer a single mobile app for managing finances, assets, and expenditures. Mint, a leader in online personal finance that Intuit purchased in 2009, used to control the market. Intuit shut off the service in early 2024 after it had been inactive for years.

In a recent Zoom interview, Agostino stated, "One of the major unresolved problems in consumer technology is managing your money." "The way American families handle their finances is essentially unchanged from the late 1990s, with the exception that we now do it via our phones rather than in person at a bank."

Monarch, founded in 2018, saw its subscriber base surge by 20 times in the year after Intuit announced it was closing Mint as users sought alternatives, according to Agostino.

Unlike Mint, which was free, Monarch relies on paying subscribers so that the company doesn’t need to focus on advertising from credit-card issuers or sell users’ data, said Agostino, who was an early product manager at Mint.

According to Wesley Chan, a co-founder of FPV, the business wanted to make enrolling accounts and tracking expenses simpler than competing products, some of which are free or integrated into banking apps.

Chan claimed that because Agostino is taking a novel approach to a challenging market, Monarch makes him think of past wagers he has made, such as his investment in the visual design platform Canva.


“What Val is doing, it’s the successor to anything that’s been done in financial planning,” Chan added. It is frictionless, simple to use, and simple to share—a feature that has never been seen before. That's the reason for his rapid growth and strong engagement rates.

The company's funding round coincides with a period of low interest among the majority of consumer-facing fintech companies in the United States. Other notable instances include Felix, a money remittance service for Latino immigrants, and Monarch, one of the few companies to raise a sizable Series B.

According to a recent PitchBook study, fintech companies raised $1.9 billion in venture capital in the first quarter, a 38% decrease from the fourth quarter that "signals deepening investor caution towards B2C models." According to PitchBook, businesses in the enterprise fintech sector received about three-quarters of all venture capital raised during the quarter.

According to Chan, the industry is still experiencing nuclear winter as a result of 2021-era firms who "raised way too much money and had zero progress and wrecked it for everybody else." "I love the nuclear-winter sectors, so that's fine with me."