Financial-planning startup Mint, winner of the TechCrunch40 Award, finally announced that it raised $4.7 million from Shasta Ventures (which led the round), First Round Capital, and angels including Google investor Ram Shriram, and executives from eBay, Intuit, Google, Yahoo, Charles Schwab, Wilson Sonsini, Reuters, Adteractive, and Weblogic/BEA.
Since it’s launch, Mint is already organizing more than $2 billion worth of people’s money. Now, it has some of its own to manage.
The round actually closed in April, but has not been announced until today (which means a second round may be around the corner). There was also a seed funding in October in which First Round Capital put in $325,000 (and then increased their ownership in the April round). CEO Aaron Patzer shares this tidbit with me how Shriram came aboard:
Ram Shriram actually came in about a month after we closed our round. At the time we only had about $200k open in the round. Unlike most investors (who wait a week, talk to their friends, bring you back for multiple meetings), Ram said “Okay, I’m in” before I was done with the presentation. He then explained that he had no upper limit on what he could invest (good problem to have!), but that his accountants lose track if he doesn’t invest at least $500k. So needless to say, we opened the round up a bit.
Needless to say.
I like to say… I like Wachovia.
I think Wachovia would sue Mint.com if they use their banking image. It say loud and clear on copyright.
“All information contained on or available via the Wachovia Corporation Web Site is protected by copyright law in the United States of America and in other countries. Unless otherwise specified, no one has permission to copy, display, distribute, republish, or create derivative works from such information in any form.”
http://www.wach...0,,2137,00.html
and privacy statement says….
* Protect and properly dispose of your account records.
* Do not share account information, passwords, user IDs, PINs, code words or other confidential information with others.
* Do not provide confidential information online unless you initiated the contact, know the party with whom you are dealing, and provide the information through a secure channel.
I will never use Mint for thousand years. I’m don’t want to get Email spam, bunk of telemarket calls, and spams. I’m protecting my finanical identifty. I would use Wachovia Wealth Managment.
For mint.com — Sorry guys…. you, can’t make me sign up.
Aaron,
Congratulations on Mint.com as well as the press releases and good luck!
Please visit http://www.quai...echnologies.com for your IT needs – Our offering is comprehensive and our partners have an extensive portfolio of customers in your space
Hey, mint…. can you get wachovia image?
Mint’s classifications are bad.
One example – T-mobile must be such a common merchant name, yet it classifies all T-Mobile transactions as clothes and accessories.
There are many such wrong categorizations. This doesn’t happen in Bank Of America’s ‘My Portfolio’ service, which usually gets the categorization right at the first time.
Actually, the bug is, if any merchant has hyphen in their name, it ignores the part that follows the hyphen.
For example, all Wal-mart transactions are shown as Wal in my account, as is the case with T-Mobile, which becomes just the letter T. Anyone else have the same issue?
Mint is the new Financial Engines.
how does it stack up to wesabe?
2 Billion isn’t a huge number, I would guess the average person imported 50k-150k in transactions. With those numbers they only have around 20,000 users, its not like their in basecamp user numbers yet.
After the high praise here, I checked it out. Actually created an account. It’s just the standard lead-gen puffery wrapped in a cloak of useless pseudo-analysis. If Ram Sriram had actually used it before making his commitment (I’ll take an order of French Fries on the side and a $500,000 dollop of Mint in my ice tea) he would be $500K richer at the end of the day.
To wit:
The financial analysis is useless, completely miscategorized, and totally misleading.
The financial savings available to me were using Vonage instead of Verizon, trading in one kind of American Express Card for another and moving my checking account to ING Bank. Duh – gee I never thought of that….
Beware – this is just another lame lead generation business.
/Ira
@28: you clearly do not know how to use Quickbooks if you think Wesabe is even in the same ballpark.
Wesabe has very BASIC capabilities and is really only good for facilitating learning from their community, which I question if it’s not primarily made up of people who have a hard time with the most basic of personal finance management.
The wisdom of the crowd for something more than common knowledge is totally dependent on the knowledge of the crowd’s members…Let’s see Wesabe call out more to substantiate their “crowd” is made up of credible opinions.
I like Mint a lot, now if only they would work out the kinks that are preventing them from supporting two of my bank accounts.
@32 JP
Yup, perception is reality. Reminds me of a company I was at that had generated $2M in TOTAL revenue and would put out press releases claiming to have $9 billion. However, the $9 billion was in perceived account value.
That said, I like what they are doing. But, would only use the service is a hypothetical way using bogus name and no personal account information.
Patent-pending? That makes me extremely suspicious of the app being more hype than reality. No, I haven’t used mint but I have worked programming in the financial industry. If they’re hyping a “patent-pending” categorization and classification algorithm, they’re probably more salesmen than engineer. The process doesn’t require you to split an atom.
IMO, they probably wasted cash trying to secure a software patent, when it won’t be defendable. It probably won’t even get granted because hundreds of other companies could likely stake a prior claim.
Moreover, I want nothing to do with them if they’re screen scraping. The problem they are trying to solve is a big, tough one but a screen scraping solution will end horribly.
@46 … good, fair question.
Reminds me of Yodlee and other account aggregation sites that helped you manage your finances all in one place when they originally started way back when.
Revenue from targeted advertising of financial products (and lead-gen as someone suggested above) based on user’s monetary profile seems to be the real idea here.
“3. Mint’s SmartSave system finds the average user over $1000 in better interest rates or prices the first time they login. I just wrote a piece on how it works:”
The $1000 it said I could save was a crock. It recommended I switch to a card that has better rewards, too bad it had worse rewards. It also recommended I switch broadband service to a more expensive version.
I’d like to read that patent “Method and apparatus for presenting a user with a custom savings plan that is wrong. Specifically, the individual recommendations look great, but after research are basically bogus.”
A. $4.2 million closed 6 months before then TechCrunch20? Harldley a little startup.
B. I used a service similiar to this through Morgan Stanley – It Closed.
C. I used a service similiar to this through Wells Fargo – It Closed.
D. I used a service similiar to this through Bank of America – It Closed
E. Mint will be out in 3 years or less.
F. I saw Mint’s presentation at TC40, decent but nothing fantastic. It was going OK until they said after we have all of your financial info we’ll send you offers from DISCOVER to lower your rate. Deal Killer!
G. I don’t see their solution as solving a problem, I see it as causing a headache.
H. There were several more interesting and innovative ideas at TC, even in the DemoPit that were more impressive than Mint.
how does it stack up to moneytrackin.com?
Moneytrackin’ doesn’t needs your bank credentials to import your financial data. That’s ugly
I have to say that I am disappointed with the service. I signed up and had no luck connecting to my bank and a major credit card company. I emailed the error to support — no response.
Oh wait, I did get the standard you will receive an email back within 24 – 48 hours email. And they assured me how important I was.
But this service is useless to me if I can load my information. Big disappointment because I was actually looking forward to using mint.com.
Oh well.
Good to hear that they will allow deleting of individual accounts on a shared login. That’s one step in the right direction… Now if they’d add portfolio tracking and asset and liability tracking, it might be worth a second look.
I want Mint.com to work so badly. But, it doesn’t. The idea is fantastic, but the reality is that the service just doesn’t work. And maybe the are struggling to keep up with their growth– I can’t get an answer from anyone in customer service without waiting for a week. …and I get answers like, “Sorry, man. Can you try again later?”.
I’m sure this is a huge task to pull off behind the scenes. Maybe that’s why Yahoo dropped the Yodleee interface a few years back. Maybe that’s why no one else has been able to pull off this idea.
The CEO promised in an earlier post (#42), Tuesday’s release Mint.com will have the ability to exclude certain accounts from our portfolio (ex – exclude my business checking etc).
Unless I’m missing something, I don’t think this feature is implemented yet and it is Wednesday night already.
Wow, an online version of MSN money or Quicken. What a revolutionary idea.
I have been using MS Money for 10+ years and just tried Mint and I love it. I don’t think I will completely ditch MS money. Anyway there is a review at http://www.thet...oney-with-mint/