June 20, 2007

More Money For Wesabe

Michael Arrington

20 comments »

Wesabe’s “online Quicken” product apparently caught the eye of Union Square Venture’s Fred Wilson, because he’s just written a check to lead a $4 million Series A round. This follows a seed round of $700,000 led by O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV) just a couple of months ago. OATV also participated in this round. Brad Burnham from Union Square Ventures has joined the board of directors.

Wesabe is differentiating itself from Quicken in three ways. First, it’s only online. Second, they’ve added tagging to transactions that are shared among users - when enough users tag a specific merchant, that tag is automatically added as a suggestion to your transaction. Finally, Wesabe is security-focused. Your third party bank and credit card account credentials are not stored on Wesabe’s servers - instead they are downloaded to your personal computer. Hackers can’t access your account credentials by breaking into Wesabe’s servers.

There are other startups generally in this space, but the real heavyweight (we hear) is Mint, which has guarded the specifics of its service closely. Those who’ve seen the demo, though, say it’s a winner.

Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 at 1:17 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

Comments

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Tod Pedler

June 20th, 2007 at 1:34 am

This is great for Wesabe. The entire accounting space, whether its Quicken or MYOB, needs disruption. A growing percentage of US tax returns are now undertaken off shore in India. The thought of having someone ten thousand miles away know about your income and spending habits has obviously reached a comfort point where services like Wesabe now make sense. Good luck Wesabe.
Albert

June 20th, 2007 at 1:54 am

Congratulations wesabe!

We are also running an “online quicken” startup from Spain, check it out at https://www.moneytrackin.com

We have over 300,000 entered transactions (and growing steadily!), and we are going to release some major new functionalities soon, stay tuned
Shawn Ward

June 20th, 2007 at 4:12 am

Congrats to Wesabe - well done. Congrats also to Fred and the team at Union Square. Good company in a great market.

It will be interesting to see where the social personal finance space ends up - and this certainly raises the intensity and awareness.

At Geezeo, we are thrilled to be one of a handful of companies that will help shape the future landscape of personal finance. Expect lots of innovation to come out of this space.

Congrats again Wesabe. Well deserved…
allan branch

June 20th, 2007 at 5:40 am

Our focus is a little different but still relative to the topic. http://www.LessAccounting.com
YouTubeSearcher

June 20th, 2007 at 6:03 am

Never heard of mint, so far just a blog and and 3rd party driven signup form. Any more info on this one ?
Steve

June 20th, 2007 at 6:38 am

Fred Wilson’s been on a tear. Funded Delicious (to Y!), Feedburner(to Google), picked up some pocket change from investment in Wallstrip (to CBS) and sold his house for a gazillion bucks. If Fred’s betting on Wesabe, I would too.
Concrete Stain

June 20th, 2007 at 7:41 am

Glad to see a decent company / get some decent money
Marc Hedlund

June 20th, 2007 at 8:43 am

Thanks much for all the great comments. We’re really happy to see the site shaping up and getting the support it needs, both from the investment community and especially from Wesabe users. We’ll keep improving what we’re doing.

Marc Hedlund, Wesabe
fred

June 20th, 2007 at 10:03 am

Hi Mike

This one has Brad’s signature on it, from finding the opportunity, to convincing the Wesabe team that our firm could help them. I am really excited to be involved with Wesabe, but I just want to make sure credit is placed in the right place. There are two of us at USV and its a true partnership.

Brad looked closely at the whole space (including Mint) and concluded that Wesabe was the one we wanted to bet on. I also think there is room for more than one big company in this market and we are looking forward to Mint’s launch as well as Geezeo. And don’t forget about Buxfer. Lot’s of potential winners in this market and its way too early to decide who the heavyweight is.

Ultimately the users will decide, not the VCs or the media.

Fred
Andre de Cavaignac

June 20th, 2007 at 11:36 am

Curiously…. Whate are these “online offerings” giving me that Microsoft Money or Quicken won’t? Is this a solution looking for a problem, or am I missing something here?
Doug

June 20th, 2007 at 11:39 am

I saw a 10 minute or so demo of Mint not too long ago and it’s very impressive. Slick looking service with a lot of cool features and what I think is a lot of potential. Plus, they have an experienced team and some good investors themselves. The whole “online Quicken” space should be a pretty interesting one over the next couple of months/years.
Jason Fried

June 20th, 2007 at 1:16 pm

I read something in Time that said “Next up for 37signals? Possibly financial software.”

Lesson: Don’t believe everything you read.
Ryan Pharis

June 20th, 2007 at 1:57 pm

I think this is an excellent space to be in; so much so that I’ve entered it myself. http://www.trackyourbudget.com
Hopefully the more choices the consumer has, the better.
Congratulations to Wesabe, they have a great application.
Alexa

June 20th, 2007 at 2:16 pm

I have tested both wesabe and mint and mint is mint and blows wesebe out the freakin door.
Shawn Ward

June 20th, 2007 at 4:19 pm

Andre,

Great question… I will let the other companies speak for themselves, but here are some of the values that Geezeo will bring that Money and Quicken don’t. Many of these I am sure the others will also offer - but I am focusing only on Geezeo.

1. Mobile enabled - access all your accounts info via text messaging

2. Automated account updates: as software products, Quicken and Money can not sync with your accounts, automatically - this creates two problems:
a. if you are not diligent about adding all your data (every 90 days) - critical
data may not be available to import
b. Prevents you from setting pro-active account alerts. Within the next two
months (so much for stealth development), Geezeo will alert you to low
balances, potential late payments, spending trend alerts, etc

3. Assistance with product selection: Geezeo will alert to money saving strategies by finding better products (ex. you can make an addtl $300 a year by moving your $2,500 in your 1.5% savings acct into a 4.5%* account). [* we want to show all your product options] Along with quantitative comparisons (rate and fee info) we will gather qualitative info (user ratings, etc) to ensure you make the best decision for you.

4. Comparisons to the community - compare your spending habits/trends versus others - see where you may be over/underspending (comparatively) and get tips and suggestions on how to save money.

Sorry for the winded post - but there are HUGE differentiators between traditional quicken and money apps and the new personal finance players. These are some of Geezeo’s differentiators - many in the space may have similar features others have much different differentiators (check out buxfer, obopay, networth, etc).

It will be an exciting ride!
sam

June 20th, 2007 at 4:23 pm

Comparing Wasabe to Intuit. Are you kidding me?

Intuit is a feature rich money managment tool and Wasabe is a social network site with VERY limited capabilities. The scary thing is the wisdom imparted by the Wesabe “crowd” is more than likely pretty lame since I have to beleive the site is full of people who have a hard time managing their own money.

What are the demographics of the repeat users of the site? Willing to give up some real numbers and not just marketing generalities Marc?

I doubt it since I am sure the hoped for liquidity event is dependent on some jacked up potential unsubstantiated by any meaniful metrics.
dave mcclure

June 21st, 2007 at 12:49 am

congrats to Brad & USV, and also to Marc & Jason & team at Wesabe.

it’s a testament to the company that this is the first deal USV has done on the west coast (yes?), and only the second outside the east coast (feedburner was chicago). hopefully brad doesn’t need to take quite as many redeyes as josh kopelman does for Mint & his other deals here in the bay area.

as noted above by Fred & Shawn & others, i’m also optimistic there’s a big market opportunity in “personal finance 2.0″ where many players — both new & old — can participate & innovate. having been along for the ride at PayPal from 2001 to 2004, i’m still amazed at how much room there is to improve on financial services… particularly for the simplest & most typical consumer use scenarios.

i agree shawn: should be a fun ride

- dave mcclure
http://www.mint.com/
http://500hats.typepad.com/
Reman Child

June 21st, 2007 at 5:06 am

Thought I’d jump on the “competitors to wesabe” bandwagon and leave a link to the new site that my company just launched a few weeks ago -

http://www.expensr.com

It has all the features you’d expect out of a financial app, plus a very nice UI, plus our newly launched community features (which takes a different approach than wesabe, allowing users to see how their spending compares to other users of a similar demographic/”tag”).

It is definitely an exciting space to be in!
Dennis Howlett

June 22nd, 2007 at 6:28 am

I recently got involved with FreeAgent Central for the simple reason that it provides a solution to a problem I’ve been scratching my head over for 25+ years. How do you provide a bullet proof accounting solution to the spreadsheet crowd that tells them: what they’re owed, what do they owe in taxes and how much is left over while still providing the professional accountant with a reliable set of records they can use for compliance purposes. The beauty of FAC is that it can be used to pro-actively manage a person’s business affairs rather than reactively as is usually the case.

The service is currently UK only but it will be globalised once the devs have got the beta out the way. That needn’t stop others taking a peek - in fact we welcome that.

12 blog reviews in already and we’ve barely made any noise about it. 158 beta testers at the last count.

Lots still to do but everyone I’ve spoken with thinks it’s disruptive in a good way.
jamie martin

June 27th, 2007 at 11:38 am

i just wanted to give a shot out to geezeo, it’s pretty sweet