Silicon Valley based Mint, an “online Quicken” that also suggest to users different ways to save money by searching for deals on credit cards, bank accounts, etc., will announce a third round of funding today – $12.1 million from new investor Benchmark Capital and all previous investors, including Shasta Ventures, Sherpalo, Felicis Ventures, Hite Capital and First Round Capital. The company has now raised a total of $17 million, most of it since October of 2007. Benchmark’s Bob Kagle is joining the Mint board.
Mint has grown to 160,000 users just six months after launching and taking the $50,000 top prize at the TechCrunch40 conference. CEO Aaron Patzer says the company is adding 10,000 new users per week, has organized over $10 billion in purchasing activity and has identified around $100 million in savings opportunities for users.
The average user logs in twice per week, Patzer says, and 10% have opted in for SMS alerts.
The company makes money via lead generations, and Patzer says users are clicking on presented opportunities 12-15% of the time.
We heard through a number of sources that venture capitalists were clamoring to get a piece of this deal. Patzer wouldn’t comment that, saying only that he was very happy to be working with Benchmark.
Assuming the numbers are correct I’m pleasantly surprised. Though I’m trying to figure out why on gods earth people would log in on average twice a week. 10,000 new users (per week) submitting REAL information is quite impressive. Sad, but a recession probbaly plays well into Mint’s business.
Note: sad from the perspective that we are in a recession.
Congrats!
The % of users that are clicking on the opportunities is quiet impressive. Mint should be able to generate a fair amount of cash flow from this.
Does anyone know of any services like this for UK users?
mint is pretty good. im happy with the consolidated email reports it sends weekly or so, about all the holdings. i mostly dont login, this email report itself is enough use for me
Same question as Paul, but for Germany.
Thanks
Yeah it’s pretty cool, I just wish I could also pay my bills through it too.
Thanks for the mojitos!
this startup is doomed unless they get some deals with the banks direct. The reason…. Banks have started giving electronic aids to customers to help keep their accounts secure. My wife recieved hers a couple weeks ago and has to put her card into the machine to get a secure pin out which is different each time.
will anybody PLEASE answer the above questions regarding international users….???
alex
Greece
I like these guys, but 17Million is a lot of money to raise in just a few months… Do they really need that much? What happened to lean, agile, and cheap? Can’t imagine what they would need 17mil for, but will give them the benefit of doubt. Anyone know how they plan on spending it?
There is a forum in Mint.com. If more international users are interested, please leave a comment, I am sure they will have this soon worldwide. It is an excellent service. While using this Mint, I gave another chance for Quicken, it is awful in balancing showing negative amounts, whereas mint balances great. Still there are minor hiccups but they are doing an excellent job. Once they add market portfolio accounts it will be perfect. Their servers are as secure as bank servers, so there are no problems so far.
I always though Quicken was the Online Quicken
http://quicken....-finances.jhtml
Personally I don’t get it as these sites seem years behind Quicken and Money
LOVE THE TITLE !!! THX
Paul/Chris/Alex
I think Kublax http://www.kublax.com/ are doing something similar for the UK not sure about other international markets. They’re currently in private Ăź I think.
TCUK wrote a bot about them http://uk.techc...urther-funding/
I’m quite happy with Mint, though I wish my credit to asset ratio were better
I think Mint will make a bundle over the next few years.
are they going to sell ads to gain all those money?
I’m very happy with Mint’s features and usability. Not so happy that I can’t get my bank to work with them, but that is Mint’s provider’s problem…not theirs.
I have a checking account that gives me 6% APY, and I know of 2 others that offer 5% APY; and these accts also reimburse up to $25/ month in ATM fees. You have to agree to receive acct summaries online only and make 10 debit card purchases/month, but it is a great deal.
Does Mint offer these deals yet or still ING Direct (3% APY)? The big advertisers that spend the money with Mint simply do not offer such good deals to the consumer. In order to maintain relevance, Mint has to offer the best deals or find an acquirer that has synergy appropriate to such a free service.
What? No mention of their competitors?
i find the money savings suggestions fairly useless. if someone’s resourceful enough to get a mint account, they’ve already got a decently yielding savings account and a low interest credit card. even if they don’t, i feel like the suggested accounts aren’t that great.
they need to update the interface a little, it feels like yahoo mail and they need to slim down to gmail.
I have heard that there http://www.kublax.com is going to be something like mint in U.K and Europe, and they might be up and running in a month or so
I guess it should work better in U.K, as switching service providers by consumers is quite common in U.K, unlike in U.S.
So their deal finding engine might be better, and more independent.
well this whole network in my opinion is flawed. Its Arringtons freinds who are the venture captialists…. I see no reason for a company to raise such amount of money. I’ve developed numerous RIAs, and 17 million over the 12 m sounds fishy.
I haven’t signed up for Mint yet but I’m still interested. I remember when it launched people were debating about the program because you had to enter in so much personal information. What are people’s opinions on the program?
I am in fund raising process and was told by one VC that the pre on Mint was around $36M. 12.1 at 36pre would mean that they diluted by roughly 20%. Nice work…
I use Mint and am quite impressed with it. My savings suggestions don’t work – I get no suggestions and it tells me, “Try categorizing more of your transactions so we know more about how you spend.”
That’s hard to believe considering I use my card(s) for EVERYTHING and Mint automatically categorizes the purchases into the proper place.
My main use of it would have to be the Spending Trends. What a reality check!
Honestly, I don’t get Mint. Seems like they just put a flashy AJAX frontend onto Yodlee’s Moneycenter. Mint uses Yodlee for it’s connection to banks and the feature set seems identical. The only difference is by using Mint you get offers and ads and maybe a slight social networking framework wrapped around your financial planning.
I’ll stick with the simple, non-AJAX, interface to keep ad-free.
So the CTR is 12-15%, but wouldnt a service like mint get paid on a CPA basis?
What is the customer acquisition rate? 5% of the total click-thrus?
People should be concerned about Mint’s independence and I think that they may be selling out trying to get deals with banks to connect to their system. Think about this..
When’s the last time you went to an ATM that let you take out $1.50, $2.00 or any amount under $20. Yea that would be never.
Then it seems odd that Mint can’t distinguish and break out your ATM fees so you can see how much I spend. I don’t spend $101.50 on ATM fees, I spent $1.50. There are sevral very obvious things Mint could help with, but don’t.
From the banks perspective they make a lot (look it up, A LOT) of money from ATM fees which costs them next nothing providing huge margins. So are they interested in cooperating with a service that makes points out that you are getting fleeced in ATM fees?
There are more example like this, I get lousy interest on my savings – however somehow the only bank switch recommendations I get are from CITI bank to … CITI Bank. Never a recommendations to switch to WAMU for example which would save me $9.50/month in checking, and $20-30/month in ATM fees.
I think they are too much in bed with the banks to be anything other than a overview.
Paul (3), Chris (5), Alex (8):
International support will start later in the year, first with Canada & the UK, then Australia/NZ, then Germany, France & Italy.
Our first order of business is a more complete investments feature (coming March 20th) where you can see all your positions and performance across all your accounts. Right now, we support 1,500 brokerages, IRAs, 401ks, and 529 plans, but you can only see your balances.
After that is improvement to our savings engine, including suggestions on when to consolidate student loans or refinance your mortgage. Then we tackle international markets.
Aaron Patzer
Founder & CEO, Mint.com
Hi Aaron,
Is there any update on when canadian bank support will be coming? Someone mentioned wesabe, but it looks a little too cheesy and distracting to be of lasting value.
Sincerely,
Aitan
Emile,
Our algorithms do automatically split cash vs. ATM fees – this is something we’ve done for many months. If the full $101.50 is still being categorized as a fee, then that’s a bug. Send an email to feedback@mint.com and we’ll take care of it in the next release.
Aaron Patzer
Founder & CEO, Mint.com
@misterdub, Do you have any idea what kind of BizDev goes on in order to get those offers?
Online applications have as much or more value-add based on their BizDev activities than the web-app tech itself. Funny how SW developers don’t acknowledge the PITA of BizDev or the barrier-to-entry it presents the competition. I guess that is a good thing for us deal negotiators.
OK, that’s great news.
Andrew/17 and Emile/25 raise good points. I only ever get suggestions to join some no-name Internet bank, and (per Emile) it would be nice if Mint added some intelligence to their pretty pie charts. I’m also of the mind of the guy up there who only uses their email summaries. I’ve found that the Mint interface is a bit clicky and their IA is counterintuitive, but it’s all very pretty of course. I’m still on the fence about consolidated financial management sites, but maybe Yodlee or some of the other frontends are worth checking out just for comparison’s sake.
Thomas Friedman, misterdub:
You’re right, there is a significant barrier to entry in all the relationships Mint.com has secured. We’ve signed deals with the 7 top credit card issuers, many top banks, and a few home services providers. Establishing and optimizing these relationships has taken many months of effort from our BD team, and we’re only now reaping the rewards. The good news is that puts us perhaps a year ahead of any competitor on that front alone.
Aaron Patzer
Founder & CEO, Mint.com
nice application, too bad I can’t use it from where I live
I like the interface, completely Javascript driven.
Who needs to login when they email the details to you?
Anyways, I am very pleased with Mint, and of all of the startups mentioned on this site, I have found Mint by far to be the most useful.
Props to whoever came up with the initial idea.
Now if only Mint can come up with a FNA for their users, then their site would really take off!
Canadians have been ignored by Silicon Valley long enough- all of these nifty web 2.0 apps that won’t expand outside the US until they’ve saturated the US market (Mint, Redfin, Partnerup, etc) are going to learn a hard lesson about choosing between competing with or acquiring newer smaller competitors in other geographies.
I know there are barriers, even on the net: we have our own laws, a significant portion of us want to be served in French, and it’s a long trip to a really cold country if you need to meet with us. You may not know this, but we have a population and economy similar in scale to California.
If any Canadian developers read this and want to talk about providing some of these services to fellow Canucks who are being ignored by Silicon Valley, drop me a line at basilberntsen at gmail dot com. I am bilingual, have a company set up that’s allowed to do business in Quebec, have access to hosting, and have an accountant. All I need is someone to code.
so there are 10000 people actually giving their financial info up a week?
Yes there is a similar offer that will start to come up apparently in April. They won the Seed camp trophy. http://www.kublax.com At this stage it’s only in alpha but seems promising.
For people asking about international support and bank support (3, 8, 15, 32, 34), I’d recommend looking at Wesabe (https://www.wesabe.com/). I work there, just so you know. We do support a number of international banks, mostly in Canada, and it’s easy for you to add your own bank, wherever you are, as long as they offer a compatible data download.
And congrats to Mint on their third round!
@Emile:
I can withdraw as low as $5 @ some Bank of America ATM machines.
Just thought I’d chime in and mention that.
i use http://www.budgetpulse.com. it is simple and neat. apart from tracking expenses, assets and bills against income, it helps to build an ideal budget by laying down millstones in expenses above regular intervals of time.
With all the hacker attacks against financial institutions (many never disclosed) and the risk of identify theft, I wouldn’t feel safe sharing my personal, private financial information with mint.com or any other similar Web site. They could never give me the assurances that it’s safe and secure, and I’m surprised how many people are making this risky move. I hardly trust established, brand-name brick and mortal financial institutions to safeguard my information, much less some here today, gone tomorrow Internet upstart with dollars signs in its eyes.
It would be interesting to find out what the demographics are for the 10k signups per/wk. I have a hard time believing people making more than 100k/yr would use this svc.
amazing product. so simple and powerful
It seems alot like the Bankrate model…
Free data (mostly)…
Wrapped with PPC ads/offers/leadgen…
Truly scalable…
congrats to Aaron & Mint team! (and to Benchmark)
keep up the great work, and looking forward to seeing more *fresh* features as you folks keep enhancing the service & making it even better
(disclosure: I’m an angel investor & occasional advisor to the company)
This will be a huge failure. This will never be mainstream, there will also be some people posting everything online but majority dont.
Its userbase will increase initially but then as the negative stories start rolling, it will face sudden death.
I like it, but agree on the slightly suspicious functionality, they keep doing odd things with ATM fees and cost. Look at this “Your $500 purchase from Citibank ATM Withdrawal” in my alerts. I wonder if I bought my groceries at this ATM? They should be able to recognize “ATM” in any transaction, but continue to get only this wrong. Also finding savings are a joke. I could actually find more savings by opening my mail of watching more TV. Both makes you wonder about their independence. Could be good though, but I would have to trust them first.
The developer of moneydance personal finance manager has been trying to get banks to allow his program access for years. I bet that someday banks will be forced to have some kind of universal api that works with every bank (securely of course)
What I’m wondering is why Mint hasn’t been able to attract top-of-the-line VC’s? Yes, Mint has raised lots of money from a big horde of second-tier VC’s, but why did the most prestigious names in the valley stay away from this deal? i.e. where is Sequoia, Accel, etc?
I just can’t wait for mint.com to come to Europe especially the UK.