Jennifer Lopez Invests In A California Fintech Startup
Jennifer Lopez and her boyfriend, baseball player Alex Rodriguez, both have invested in fintech company Acorns. The company is popular among Hollywood stars. The actor Ashton Kutcher already has invested in it.
PayPal, the international investment company BlackRock, and the American media company NBCUniversal also invested in Acorns, writes The Wall Street Journal.
Acorns is a mobile app that offers its customers to postpone the “doit” making the total purchase sum in round figures on debit cards. For example, a client buys a phone for $ 499 – the app will write off $ 500, the rest $ 1 will be placed in a kind of piggy bank.
Startup CEO Noah Kerner, who, incidentally, once acted as a DJ at a Jay Lo concert, expects to turn the company’s niche product into a large-scale savings application with a client base of 100 million users.
It is worth noting that the Bank of America banking application has a similar function, and the credit institution launched this savings program more than 10 years ago.
The killer feature of Acorns is a system of fees: it is not charged to the client if he withdraws money from an ATM or pays by card. There is also no commission for overdraft and for a minimum balance. Instead, a startup charges a client $ 1 to $ 3 per month “until he invests $ 1 million.”
The company earns mainly on monthly user payments. Kerner take up a post of CEO in 2015. Since then, the company has grown by more than two orders of magnitude: from 220 thousand accounts to 5 million. Moreover, more than half of the customers actively use the application.
In January 2019, Acorns raised $ 105 million. The lead investors were Comcast Ventures and the aforementioned company NBCUniversal. Nine investors participated in the financing round, including the Yuri Milner DST Global Fund. During this round of financing, investors valued the company at $ 755 million.
Recently, American stars have been eager to invest in fintech companies. Earlier this year, rapper Snoop Dogg invested in Klarna, a Swedish unicorn that is currently valued at $ 5.5 billion.
Source: en.bit.news
