Tree.com Acquires Mint Competitor Thrive

New York-based Loudwater Labs has sold the assets of its online personal finance management application Thrive to Tree.com (Nasdaq:TREE), the company behind services such as the formerly IAC-owned LendingTree and RealEstate.com. This means that the publicly listed Tree.com now has a very good resource in its hands as well as sufficient reach to give Mint and other personal finance management tools like Wesabe, Geezeo and Buxfer a good run for their money.

Tree.com Chairman and CEO Doug Lebda commented that the acquisition of Thrive is a perfect fit with the strategic vision of Tree.com, and you don’t have to be a genius to see that he has a point there. Tree.com operates a number of strong brands in the financial and real estate space, and its customer base can clearly benefit from free tools like Thrive which enable users to better monitor, manage and improve their personal financial health, particularly in the tough economic times we’re in.

According to its website (which also includes funny bios for their team members), $225,209,097 is currently managed with the help of Thrive at the time of this writing. For the sake of comparison, Mint says it’s tracking $50 billion in transactions, $15 billion in assets and has identified more than $100 million in potential savings for its users.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed and are said not to have had a material impact on the operations of Tree.com. According to the about-page, Thrive’s investors included current and former executives from Paypal, Citigroup Investment Banking and Limewire.