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Mint aggregates all your financial life in one, easy-to-understand place. Mint also gives you free advice on how to save money
North America, United States TechCrunch 40 0 Winner
2009
Acquired
Aaron Patzer Founder
The company reached profitability in 2023, however, more customers began asking for web and Android capabilities so they could share Copilot with family and friends.
Welcome back to The Interchange, where we take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. If you want to receive The Interchange directly in your inbox every Sunday, head here to sign up! Last week, we chronicled some big rounds in the fintech space, Intuit’s decision to shutter Mint and what that means […]
Monarch's co-founder said that Nov. 1 “was our biggest day in terms of new users since we launched the app” in January 2021.
Intuit Ventures will identify growth opportunities and trends beneficial for Intuit's key customers — small businesses and consumers.
At TechCrunch Disrupt, our Startup Battlefield event is the centerpiece of the event, the true heart of this signature program. There’s good reason we take it so seriously. Over the years, the Startup Battlefield competition has helped launch dozens of nascent startups that have grown into game-changing brands, including Cloudflare, Dropbox, Vurb, Mint, GetAround, Fitbit, […]
Out-of-network ATM fees. Monthly service fees. Card replacement fees. Foreign exchange fees. Wire transfer fees. Overdraft fees. Check fees. Fees, fees, fees, fees, fees. Oh and interest, of course. Banking used to be built on a simple economic premise: tuck money away from customers into deposit accounts that pay interest, and then lend that money […]
After two years operating in stealth, Mint.com founder Aaron Patzer’s new startup Vital Software is open for business. Patzer made the announcement Wednesday while on the Next Stage at Disrupt SF. Patzer’s company, which he co-founded with Dr. Justin Schrager of Emory University, is an enterprise software business that aims to make emergency rooms visits […]
This year marks the 10th anniversary of Mint’s win at the first ever TechCrunch Startup Battlefield competition (back then – lost in the mists of time – it was known as TechCrunch 40). But what is less known about founder Aaron Patzer is that he’s one of the pioneers of AI. Now based in the […]
New consumer-facing financial applications are being built on top of old banking infrastructure, while other startups are going around financial infrastructure altogether. Together, they are unbundling the roles of banks and other financial incumbents.
Consumer debt remains one of the biggest challenges with the American economy. The average household has $130,922 in debt, and debt interest payments represent 9 percent of the average household income. The silver lining is that with tough problems comes the opportunity for tech companies and investors to build solutions to address them. Here are some of the startups helping us get out of debt.
The founders of Ask.fm -- the popular social Q&A app that became embroiled in a cyberbullying media storm before being acquired by IAC -- have backed new dating app Mint.
When I first got the job running marketing at Mint, founder and CEO Aaron Patzer told me that we had to get Mint to 100,000 users within six months of launching. The number itself didn’t intimidate me: Before Mint, I had been Facebook employee No. 30. I’d witnessed crazy, exponential user growth first-hand. The difference was that at Mint, we were pre-product and certainly pre-repeatable-growth-engine. That meant we had to invent something from scratch.
Debt-management focused Student Loan Hero is ramping up the competition in the "Mint for Student Loans" space, with now 2,000 people on board, $63 million in debt under management, a platform built on proprietary technology (not Yodlee, like some of its nearest competitors), and a little bit of seed funding from Expansion VC.
Intuit's Mint has one less competitor now. Adaptu, a Portland-based startup that positioned its mobile wallet as an alternative to Mint, is closing its doors. The company announced the change via its website and in emails to its subscriber base. According to the company, the decision was made because Adaptu didn't want to have to transition away from its free model in order to remain in business.
Home (and military) robot maker iRobot has just acquired Evolution Robotics, the makers of the Mint floor-cleaning robot with an R&D shop focused on navigational tools. The Mint cleaner will join iRobot's Roomba line. In a press release that touts the move as an expansion of iRobot's "position as global robotic floor care market-leader," the company announced that it paid cash for Evolution out of its own reserves.
Earlier today, online banking startup Simple unveiled new reporting features that will allow users to see how much -- and where -- they're spending money in their bank accounts. Those features seemed aimed squarely at Intuit-owned Mint.com, which has been one of the leading online budgeting and data visualization tools. One advantage that Simple has over Mint and other online budgeting tools is that is linked directly to a user's bank account, meaning all of the data and reporting that it generates is directly actionable. And it can do that because users have their own Simple-branded debit cards and checking accounts. Well, it might not have that advantage for very long, as it appears that Mint will soon introduce its own debit card, called the Mint Control Card.
Scott Cook started Intuit in 1983, and since then he and the company have overcome quite a few obstacles. He watched as mobile became a dominant channel in people's lives, found ways to penetrate emerging markets, and leveraged Intuit's excellent reputation to pick up the hot new kid on the block, Mint.com. The acquisition went down in 2009, two years after Mint launched on the TechCrunch 40 stage. Cook says that by taking its rival and nurturing it under Intuit's (much larger) wing, Mint has grown to be four times larger than it was at the time of acquisition. This is a classic case of two competitors coming together in a mutually beneficial way. Intuit provides an excellent distribution platform for Mint, and in turn, Mint pushes users into Intuit's portfolio of various financial tools, including TurboTax.
Mint.com, the financial service we first mentioned at TechCrunch40 in 2007 (wow, that seems like a long time ago), announced that they have launched a new native app specifically for 9 and 10 inch Android tablets running Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich. This new app, available in the Android Market, will join the previously available versions for iPhone, iPad and Android mobile phones. Curiously, there is no mobile web version (that I have been able to find).
Aaron Patzer, the founder of Mint, has a new project that he is spending half his time on (he continues to spend the other half as VP of Product Innovation at Intuit, which acquired Mint two years ago for $170 million). His new project is called Swift, and it is his vehicle (if you will) to exlore the feasibility of building a personal maglev vehicle transit system. "The goal is to see if I can develop a new transportation system to displace cars in most urban and suburban settings," he told me recently, "with the goal being 5x the speed, and bringing the cost of maglev from today's costs of $50m / mile down to $4-5m / mile, which would be the same as adding one lane of asphalt/concrete road. Not sure if it will pan out, as I'm deep in the science and simulation phase."
Intuit's "Quicken 2007 for the Mac" users have a problem. The personal financial accounting software is not going to work under Lion, Apple's new OS 10.7, due to be released as early as Wednesday. Intuit suggests three solutions. But each has its own flaws, especially if you want to track investments, reconcile your financial statements or not have to buy 3 software programs or a PC. There are non-Intuit alternatives out there, each with their own fan base. None of them match Quicken 2007, a far-from-perfect but still very useful, powerful program. Software is supposed to get better over time, but for Mac home accounting users, that's not the case. One of the very first killer 'apps' for Apple computers was VisiCalc, a spreadsheet program used by some to balance checkbooks, track credit cards and determine net worth. We've come a long way since then, but for Mac users looking for a traditional and full featured personal accounting program, there is no easy solution.
Money Dashboard, which can be thought of as a Mint.com for the UK, gets its consumer launch today.
Running in some form of beta since December 2009, the startup, which is funded to the tune of £2m, provides an online service for consumers to manage their finances via a dashboard that aggregates data - balances and transactions - from online bank accounts and credit cards etc. It's powered by Yodlee, as was Money Dashboard's, ultimately unsuccessful, competitor Kublax.
Money Dashboard's features include the ability to track and categorise spending, and set budgets, along with email alerts to warn users if they exceed their set budget or are about go into overdraft. And in future, says the company, it will also be possible to alert users to suspicious transactions on their accounts.
Here at TechCrunch, we've long been fans of personal finance site Mint, which won our first TechCrunch40 conference in 2007 and was acquired two years later by Intuit for an impressive $170 million.
But things may not be going gangbusters at the company these days. We've learned that in the next month, three key employees from the original, pre-acquisition team will be leaving, including Director of Marketing Stewart Langille, lead designer Justin Maxwell, and head software engineer Daryl Puryear. One Mint insider estimated that around 40% or more of the pre-acquisition team has left since Intuit bought the company in September 2009, some of whom have left substantial amounts of unvested stock on the table. Most of the executive team remains, but many employees have gone on to work at or launch their own startups.
While attending an exhausting, snowy yet insightful LeWeb in Paris, the TechCrunch Europe team met with a variety of startups and founders. One of them is a recently launched Slovenian company called Toshl, which gives people a well-designed mobile app to track their day to day expenses.
Both the web interface and the mobile version, which is available for most mobile phones such as iPhone, Android and Symbian, allow you to input all of your expenses manually and sync them in between. In comparison to other startups in the space, however, Toshl has not yet secured any partnerships with banks.
Marc Hedlund, co-founder and former CEO of personal finance company Wesabe, has penned a refreshingly honest and open take on why he thinks the startup lost to rival Mint.
The latter launched later than Wesabe (and won the top prize at the TechCrunch40 conference back in 2007) and was later acquired by Intuit for $170 million, while Wesabe had a less stellar exit and hit the deadpool last June.
Money Dashboard, which is shooting to become the Mint.com for the UK, launched its open beta today, coming out of a period in closed Beta which, they say, was "massively over-subscribed" after its appearance in October. The site recently completed a funding round, securing £1 million of investment via a consortium of investors.
It also has a lot less competition now that main competitor, Kublax, deadpooled this February.
The best way to describe Offermatic is this - imagine if Mint, Blippy and Groupon went off to Vegas for the weekend, got wasted and ended up in bed together. Nine months later, out pops Offermatic.
Like Mint, Offermatic is a front end user interface to Yodlee's robust financial network. And the service digs through your credit card transactions just like Blippy does (although they aren't posted for the world to see). And like Groupon, Offermatic is pushing special offers to users.
What the deuce? This looks like some sort of Swiffer/robot cyborg that mated with an Apple power supply. Apparently the Mint floor cleaner is available for $249 and is now on pre-order. The sweeper dusts and wet mops floors and you can add Swiffer cloths to it. It’s much smaller than the Roomba and I’d […]
Are you a budding Web entrepreneur who would like some pointers or advice from seasoned company founders? MayField Fund and First Round Capital are sponsoring a raffle to give away mentoring sessions with the founders of Digg (Jay Adelson), Flickr (Caterina Fake), Mint (Aaron Patzer), Ning (Gina Bianchini), Slide (Max Levchin), and Zynga (Mark Pincus).
The raffle will take place at a private event in Silicon Valley with space for 100 attendees on March 1. But you can win a ticket for the event by applying here. The event and raffle are free, but the 100 attendees in the running will be selected beforehand by partners at Mayfield and First Round.
We track a lot of acquisitions on CrunchBase. At the beginning of 2009, acquisitions were at a standstill. But as the economy begrudgingly roused itself from recession, the deal flow started to pick up in the summer, and then rebounded more in the third quarter. There are still a couple weeks left in the year, and a lot can still happen, such as Google buying Yelp for more than $500 million. But with the year wrapping up, we put together an initial list of the top technology acquisitions of 2009.
We'll update the list if necessary at the end of the year (for instance, we don't include Yelp in our list because it is not yet final), but it is not likely to change by much. Out of $64 billion worth of technology M&A Crunchbase tracked in 2009, about $54 billion went to the top 30 deals ((see table below). These are only technology deals (Web, software, hardware, mobile) and do not include cleantech or biotech (nor do they include other industries Crunchbase tracks as well).
See the list after the jump.
Feel like this holiday season is a bit cheerier than last year's? You're not alone. According to some new data from personal finance site Mint (which was acquired by Intuit for $170 million earlier this year), the holiday season has been accompanied by a major bounce in consumer spending. After a dismal shopping season in 2008, many retailers specializing in everything from electronics to high-end clothing have seen big jumps in the last few months. In a post called 'The Return of Retail: Holiday Spending 2009', Mint has illustrated these trends in a number of attractive infographics (we've included a few below).
So where does this data come from? To your everyday consumer, Mint is great for a lot of things — it can help you manage your budget, find deals on credit cards, and plenty of other other good stuff. But Mint can also look at aggregate spending trends to see how the economy, and even individual retailers are doing.