Now more than ever, personal finance education and help is crucial to anyone’s financial health. Mint.com, a former TechCrunch 40 company who won the top prize at the conference, has grown incredibly since its launch and was recently acquired by Intuit for $170 million. TechCrunch50 startup LearnVest is serving a different purpose when it comes to online finances; the startup focuses on helping users, particularly women, organize their finances and learn how to become financially savvy. It’s kind of like the online version of financial planner Suze Orman.
When you first log in to LearnVest, the site will ask you a series of questions about your financial health (i.e. how much credit card debt do you have), you life stages (i.e. do you rent, are you planning a family soon, do you own a house) and your financial education level (i.e. have you checked your credit score lately). LearnVest will use all this information to diagnose your financial health and education level and will then give you a snapshot of what you need to learn and improve. → Read More
Aaron Patzer is the CEO and founder of Mint.com, a personal finance site that launched two years ago at TechCrunch40. Last night the news broke that Mint is being acquired for $170 million by Intuit.
Today, exactly two years after launching at TechCrunch40, I’m excited to announce that Mint.com has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Intuit for about $170m. Intuit, a $10b company (NASDAQ: INTU) is perhaps best known as the maker of Quicken, QuickBooks, and TurboTax.
This is a great opportunity to bring Mint’s technology and easy-to-use personal financial management system to potentially tens of millions of consumers, an eventually small businesses and banking customers as well.
What’s perhaps even more amazing about this opportunity is that we made it to this point just three years after the company started: one year to build, and two years in operation. I doubt this could have happened anywhere but Silicon Valley. → Read More
Intuit will acquire the free online personal finance service Mint, we’ve confirmed from a source close to the deal, for around $170 million. Silicon Alley Insider first reported a rumor on this. The deal should be announced in the next few days.
Update: CEO Aaron Patzer has just confirmed the deal on-stage at TechCrunch50, and written a guest post describing The Value of TechCrunch50 that contains more details.
This is a terrific exit for Mint, which first launched two years ago at TechCrunch50. Mint took the top prize at that event and has been growing fast ever since. Their last round of financing valued the company at $140 million.
In all, Mint has raised $32 million over three venture rounds. → Read More
More information is coming in about that $14 million third round of financing that personal finance service Mint closed last month. That financing, we’ve heard from two sources close to the company, valued Mint at a whopping $140 million post-money valuation.
That’s not bad for a company that launched just two years ago – Mint won the top prize at TechCrunch50 2007.
In a “normal” round of financing a company would dilute by 25-35%, meaning the expected valuation on a $14 million round would be, roughly, $45 million – $60 million. The $140 million valuation shows two things – Mint is on a roll, and they don’t seem to need much capital.
Mint has grown to 1.4 million registered users, tracking $175 billion in transactions and $47 billion in assets. The site also reports that it has identified $300 million in potential savings offers for its users. It primarily makes its money by generating leads for financial institutions, but it’s also sitting on a goldmine of user data that it hasn’t even begun to tap into yet. → Read More
Personal finance tracking site Mint.com added a bunch of new budgeting and trending features today. Mint presents consumers with a financial dashboard based on spending and income data from their bank, credit card, and other financial accounts. It expanded its charts to include spending over time, income history, asset allocation, and net worth over time.
You can now plan for irregular expenses such as property taxes, auto insurance, or vacations. Budgeted items can be rolled over into the next month if they haven’t been used up, and Mint now figures out your income based on your paycheck. It takes all of this data and projects your savings or shortfall over time.
All of these new features will be appreciated by Mint’s 1.4 million registered (and 550,000 active) users, but they also point to a new direction for the site: bookkeeping for small businesses. → Read More
Mint, the popular personal finance site that won 2007′s TechCrunch40 conference, has closed a new $14 million Series C funding round. Silicon Alley Insider discovered the round in an SEC filing this morning, and we’ve just gotten off the phone with CEO Aaron Patzer, who confirmed the deal and filled us in on the details.
The $14 million round was led by DAG Ventures, and also includes newcomer Founder’s Fund. Existing investors Benchmark Capital, Shasta Ventures, First Round Capital, and Sherpalo all participated as well. Patzer declined to comment on the company’s valuation, but says that it is “decidedly an up round” and that it was preemptive. Mint hasn’t disclosed its revenues, but Patzer says that they’re up 8x year over year. → Read More
Yahoo just opened its doors to a bunch of new OpenSocial apps. People who use MyYahoo as a startpage can now add apps from Mint, KaChing, WordPress, and more. The apps include a small view which appear on your MyYahoo page, but can also open up into a canvas view (which is essentially a dedicated page on Yahoo for that particular app). The Mint app, for instance, gives you a dashboard view of your finances and alerts. The WordPress app lets you do a quick post to your blog right from Yahoo. All together, Yahoo added 14 new apps for users to choose from. You can check your meds (Drugs.com), gas prices (GasBuddy), fantasy stock portfolio (kaChing), food and wine pairings (MyRecipes + Snooth), share books (WeRead), or just play Flood-It (LabPixies). You gotta add Flood-It, love that game. → Read More
Mint, the popular personal finance site that won 2007′s TechCrunch40, is launching a new feature called “Financial Fitness” which, strange as it may sound, adds an element of gaming to the service. Yes, it may sound like a bizarre combination at first – personal finance and fun aren’t exactly two things that go hand in hand. But it’s also a smart move on Mint’s part, as it looks to turn the mundane and often confusing activity of getting your financial affairs in order into something a bit more tolerable while increasing Mint’s engagement in the process. Mint is running the new feature in a private beta for a few weeks, and the first 500 TechCrunch readers to Email techcrunch-getfit@mint.com with the Email address they use on Mint.com will gain access.
The game itself is fairly simple. It outlines five main principles that users should focus on on the road to financial fitness, including ‘spend less than you earn’, ‘manage credit and debt wisely’, and so on. Each of these core principles has a number of tasks associated with it, like ‘Avoid Bank Fees’ and ‘Come in under budget’. As you complete tasks, you are rewarded with points. Over time, you can earn merit badges for completing more difficult tasks, like being named as a “Financial Guru” for maintaining a 100% health status for an extended period of time. And then there’s the more tangible bonus of likely having more money than you started with. → Read More
When it comes to startups in the online personal finance sphere, most people think of Mint. But another player in the space, Wesabe, has been holding its own as well, seeing some nice growth in the past year. Which one you use is probably a matter of personal taste, but perhaps you were mesmerized by Mint’s slick iPhone app. Well, now Wesabe has one as well.
So how do the apps stack up? Well, there are two key differences: Mint’s looks nicer, but Wesabe’s is more dynamic. What I mean by that is, with Mint’s iPhone app you can only see an overview of your finances, and look at things like the budget you set up online. With Wesabe’s iPhone app, everything is editable. And that’s a nice feature because more than a few times with Mint, I have seen a transaction categorized wrong, but had to login on my computer to edit it. → Read More
Intuit, the company behind the well-known Quicken suite of money management software that includes Quicken Online, can’t believe how well its competitor Mint is doing. In fact, they were so bewildered by Mint’s claims of gaining 3,000 new users a day and jumping from 600,000 to 850,000 users in a matter of months that they decided to send a threatening letter demanding an explanation for this apparently inconceivable feat. We’ve obtained copies of both Intuit’s letter and Mint’s reply, which we’ve embedded below.
From Intuit’s letter:
“While we do not wish to suggest that Mint.com is engaging in false advertising, the substantial difference in claimed user numbers over a short period time [from 600,000 to 800,000] is of some concern. As a result, we’re requesting that you provide us with the Substantiation and evidence that you rely upon to support the above reference claims… before February 6, 2009.”
Note that the letter says that Intuit doesn’t “wish to suggest that Mint is engaging in false advertising”, despite the fact that that was the entire purpose of the letter. Nice. → Read More
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 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. → Read More
Aaron Patzer is the CEO and founder of Mint.com, a personal finance site that helps 900,000 consumers keep track of their spending. Mint’s data is a snapshot of the consumer economy. In the guest post below, Aaron parses the data to tell us what the economy looks like from consumer’s eyes.
Consumers are hurting, but if Mint’s data is indicative of the economy as a whole, it is not as bad as you might think.
(Mint was the the winner of our first TechCrunch40 conference, an experience Aaron wrote about in another guest post ).
At the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland this week, it’s a somber environment. Nearly every session – at least every session that’s full – is about the global economic crisis. While there is much rhetoric and shifting of blame, there is little mention of hard data beyond stock market declines and the price of bailouts.
As an engineer, and founder of a company where one of our core values is “quantify everything”, lack of numbers bothers me. How bad are things really? Answers like “really bad” or “worst since the Great Depression” just don’t do it for me. What does it mean in dollars and cents? → Read More
Mint, a fast growing financial site that won the top award at the 2007 TechCrunch40 conference, is a great way to track your personal finances. It’s been described as an online Quicken, but it’s a lot more than that, too, since user data can be aggregated and shared in interesting ways. It’s not listed in the App store directory yet, but you can grab it here.
But how can you watch every penny during those few moments each day you aren’t sitting in front of your computer watching the stock markets tank? That’s where Mint for the iPhone comes in, which just launched. Check balances on your checking, savings, credit card and loan accounts. Track expenses and budgets. Watch the dismal performance of your 401(k), brokerage and IRA accounts, etc.
All of which may be a little much. But Mint will be very helpful in some situations, like alerting you asap if a large transaction is made on your credit card, or the ex husband just cleaned out your bank account. → Read More
Flickr’d Sony and Microsoft (especially Microsoft) might as well pack their bags and leave the Japanese gaming market altogether. Why? For one, Square Enix just announced that Dragon Quest X will be released for the Wii, probably sometime in 2010 at the earliest. That means Nintendo will struggle to manufacture the 948593485739485739485 Wiis it’ll need to keep up with demand. Keep in mind that Dragon Quest IX, which is for the DS, hasn’t even been released yet. And if you have no idea about this whole Dragon Quest nonsense, I suggest you listen to this Retronauts podcast from 1UP. Basically, the Dragon Quest series is as close to a money printing machine as a non-government entity can legally have. Whatever system has Dragon Quest is guaranteed to sell quite a few units. Perhaps more than that. → Read More
Mint, the personal financial site that won TechCrunch40, continues to thrive even as our economy sinks deeper into an economic decline. The company has just been selected as a TechPioneer by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland – an honor only given to 34 companies worldwide (other winners in the tech space this year include Brightcove, Etsy, Mojix, and Slide, with past winners including Google, 23andMe, Infosys, and Mozilla). The World Economic Forum is an international organization aiming to help improve the world, and each TechPioneer is chosen for its contributions towards meeting that goal. → Read More
Mint, the personal finance startup that won last year’s TechCrunch 40, has launched a host of new features including investment tracking, 401k managment, and more flexible budget sheets. CEO Aaron Patzer says that the new features finally make Mint a one-stop place to get an overview on your entire financial portfolio, and will drop the site’s ‘Beta’ label accordingly. Patzer also notes that in the past few weeks of economic turmoil, Mint has been seeing its highest traffic ever -with registrations up 100% – as users scramble to save money wherever they can.
Mint originally released its investment tracking functionality to a small portion of its users, and will now be expanding the feature to everyone. Users can track their Brokerage, IRA, 401k and 529 accounts, and can drill down in each to see how their investments are performing relative to the market average. → Read More
Mint, an online personal finance site, has gotten a facelift. The new site sports a much cleaner design than the previous iteration, and appears to be focused on describing what Mint actually does rather than presenting pretty (but somewhat overwhelming) graphics. For now the improvements are mainly on the external portion of the site (for non-members), with the members’ portion switching to the new design in the next few weeks. That normally isn’t big news, but what caught my attention is that Mint has been bucket testing various redesign formats with some users and is seeing conversion rates increase by 20% over the current site. That equals “hundreds of thousands” of more registered users over the course of a year given their current growth rates, says CEO Aaron Patzer. When we last checked in with them, they had 350,000 registered users and were tracking $11 billion in assets. Those numbers are likely substantially higher now. Most startups have very limited resources and are so busy building and maintaining core features that they can’t spend too much time doing user testing on various concepts. Sometimes it makes sense to just take a step back and think about usability, though. It can pay off in the end. Since the site’s launch last year, it has added a number of new features including loan tracking and investment tracking. However, most of these functions haven’t been readily apparent to most users – something the new design is looking to remedy. Mint allows users to keep track of their finances, presenting spending history with attractive graphs and typically requiring much less effort compared to programs like Quicken. Unfortunately, while the site serves its purpose well, it is currently unable to actually transfer any funds to pay bills – you’ll have to go to your bank’s website to do that. As part of the update, Mint is also releasing a handful of new guides to personal finance, ranging from “reducing credit card debt” to the seemingly obvious “saving money while dining out”. Mint, which has now raised $17 million in venture capital, was the overall winner of the TechCrunch40 event in 2007. The new designs are below. In the first image the old is on left, new is on right. CrunchBase Information Mint Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Mint, the popular personal finance site that won TechCrunch 40, has further expanded its services by introducing support for mortgage and loan tracking. Users will now be able to keep tabs on their loans from over 1,000 supported institutions. In addition to the mortgage and loan tracking, Mint also monitors users’ savings accounts, credit cards, and investments. Mint doesn’t deal with any actual fund transfers. Instead, it monitors users’ spending habits, producing coherent graphs that are designed to help people save their money (or at least know where it’s all going). Users can also elect to receive SMS and email alerts when bills are due or their balance drops below a certain level. Mint has seen extremely quick growth since its launch at TechCrunch40, and is now monitoring a total of $11 billion in assets, with 350,000 registered users, it says. CEO Aaron Patzer says that Mint will eventually be able to move money around, but that functionality won’t be coming until 2009. Until then, Patzer says that the addition of mortgage and loan tracking will let Mint users effectively monitor their entire financial portfolio. It’s too bad we’ll still have to rely on our banks’ websites to actually pay the bills. CrunchBase Information Mint Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Aaron Patzer launched his new startup Mint.com at TechCrunch40 last year. As the top company he received a cash award of $50,000 and a ton of press attention. Since TechCrunch40 the company has raised over $17 million in venture financing and 10,000 or so new users sign up each week. We asked Aaron to write about his experience at TechCrunch40 – the good, the bad, and everything else. We’re striving to preserve the magic for our upcoming event, TechCrunch50. And not repeat our rookie errors. His post is below. Presenting at TechCrunch 40 last September was probably the most important 7 minutes of my professional life. I’m not exaggerating here. It’s where Mint.com launched. Rewind a bit. I started Mint in March of 2006 out of frustration. Existing tools like Quicken and MS Money took way too much work, and provided very little real insight on your finances. Like many a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, I quit my job, invested half my life savings in the company, and convinced a few friends to join me for very meager pay. By September 2006, we had enough of a prototype for seed funding. We spent the next year solid building the product, working and re-working the UI, and trying to come up with an elegant way to connect to 6,500 financial institutions. Mint was ready – well, almost ready – to launch. TechCrunch 40 gave us a good line in the sand, an absolute hard date that everyone could rally around. In a startup, that means focus, and focus is everything. That was nine months ago, and we were at zero. Now Mint.com is up to nearly 300,000 users, we’re leading our all competitors by a factor of at least 5x, and we’ve raised $17m in funding from Benchmark, Shasta, Sherpalo, First Round, and more. Presenting at (and winning) TechCrunch 40 helped us get to where we are today. Here’s how: 1. TechCrunch is a Massive Press Platform The event is well attended by press. Even prior to winning, we did at least 10 interviews, including Forbes, Fortune, Business 2.0, VentureBeat, and CNET. I even got suckered into a fake-interview (which I didn’t realize was fake until they asked me to explain the difference between a geek and a nerd). The event is loaded with bloggers. And for startups, the blogosphere probably matters more than traditional media for the first few months. According → Read More
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