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Personal finance startup Truebill raises $17M
Truebill, a startup offering a variety of tools to help users take control of their finances, announced today that it has raised $17 million in Series C funding.
When I first wrote about the startup in 2016, it was focused on helping users track and cancel unwanted subscriptions. Since then, it’s expanded into other financial products, like reports on your personal expenses and the ability to negotiate lower bills.
This week, Chief Revenue Officer Yahya Mokhtarzada told me that with the pandemic leading to a dramatic reduction in ad costs, Truebill was able to make TV advertising a key channel for reaching new users.
And of course, the financial uncertainty has made the product more appealing too — particularly its smart savings tool, where users can automatically set aside money for their goals.
“People became aware of the need to have some cushion,” Mokhtarzada said. “You should start saving when things are going well, before you need it, but [saving during the pandemic] is better than not doing it at all. We’ve seen a big bump in smart savings adoption, which is at an all-time high.”
Image Credits: Truebill
The new round brings Truebill’s total funding to $40 million. It was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Eldridge Capital, Cota Capital, Firebolt Ventures and Day One Ventures.
The startup says the round will allow it to develop new products and features, including net worth tracking, automated debt payments and shared accounts.
Mokhtarzada added that the company will be making big investments in data science to help follow its “north star” of financial health, where he said, “The data challenge is significant.”
Sure, it’s pretty straightforward to recognize whether someone’s doing well or poorly financially, but the real goal is to “recognize trends and shortfalls before they happen.”
For example, instead of simply alerting users when they’ve been charged an overdraft fee on their account, Mokhtarzada said, “What is helpful is to have predictive models analyze data to anticipate a cashflow shortage and have the right tools in place that prevent it.”
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Truebill raises $15M to build a comprehensive platform for personal finance
Personal finance startup Truebill announced today that it has raised $15 million in Series B funding.
The new funding was led by Eldridge Industries, with participation from Evolution VC and previous investors, including Cota Capital, Lucas Venture Group and YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim.
When the Y Combinator-backed startup raised seed funding back in 2016, it was focused on what Chief Revenue Officer Yahya Mokhtarzada now describes as “a single function” — helping users track all their subscriptions and recurring expenses, and then to cancel them when desired.
Mokhtarzada said the Truebill team subsequently saw an opportunity, given “the increasing degree of financial complexity in people’s lives,” to take “a more holistic view of personal finance.”
Truebill still offers subscription tracking, and Mokhtarzada said that’s usually what brings new users in. But it’s also added capabilities like automated budgeting, automated saving and bill negotiation. And this fall, it plans to launch additional features, including bill pay, credit score monitoring and a rewards program.
Consumers have plenty of other personal finance tools to choose from, but Mokhtarzada said most of them are focused on fulfilling a specific need and will likely become less relevant as your financial situation changes.
“The other half is, if you look at the App Store, it’s filled with single point solutions,” he said. “As your financial life gets more sophisticated and complex, the consumer is ending up with five or more different point solutions. All of that needs to be consolidated into one place.”
Truebill says it currently has 500,000 active users. The basic product is free, then users can pay a price of their choosing for premium features like custom budget categories; Truebill also takes a cut of the savings when it negotiates lower bills.
The company recently opened new headquarters in Silver Spring, Md. Mokhtarzada said Truebill still has an office in San Francisco, but he noted that he and his co-founders/brothers previously built Webs.com in Silver Spring.
“San Francisco obviously has a very competitive market — it’s harder to hire and very difficult to retain talent,” he added. “With the D.C. area, it feels like we’ve found an untapped market, with very talented engineers working for the government, working in an area of technology that’s not very exciting for them.”
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Truebill raises seed funding to help you cancel unwanted subscriptions
Truebill, a startup that helps people track and cancel their subscriptions, announced it has raised a small round of seed funding.
The round includes $120,000 from Y Combinator, with additional funding from angel investors like David Marcus (formerly a PayPal executive and now vice president of messaging products at Facebook), KISSmetrics co-founder Hiten Shah and Saba founder Bobby Yazdani… Read More
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