Improving America’s Financial Health: Truebill Banks On $17M

People are always looking for ways to cut costs or find a good deal on subscriptions. Truebill is one company providing a way to do that and is poised for further growth after raising a $17 million Series C round.

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The Maryland-based platform, founded in 2015, enables users to manage their personal finances and improve their financial health.

The funding round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Day One Ventures, Eldridge, Cota Capital and Firebolt Ventures. Including the Series C, Truebill has raised a total of $40 million.

Armed with the new funding, the company is rounding out its offerings as a “super app” for finances to include: net-worth tracking (including tracking physical assets like home and car and how value changes overtime), shared accounts, expanded smart savings and emergency funds, and an expanded credit report section.

“Our goal is to dig into the data and begin using it to drive behaviors,” Yahya Mokhtarzada, co-founder and chief revenue officer, told Crunchbase News. “There has been great adoption of smart savings, but now we want to understand who is hitting their goals and who isn’t and what separates them. For those who aren’t we are looking at what we can do to help them and encourage that behavior.”

One of those ways is to offer bonuses: Truebill will put money into the accounts of people meeting their goals to help them stay motivated and to keep moving toward their savings goals, he added.

Managing growth

We’ve been reporting on Truebill since it announced a $5 million Series A round in 2018. Back then, we introduced you to Mokhtarzada, who started Truebill with his brothers, co-founder and CEO Haroon Mokhtarzada, and Idris Mokhtarzada (chief technology officer), after they sold their previous company Webs, a website creation service.

As a new company, a few of its first services enabled users to easily link their bank accounts to track their recurring subscriptions, as well as bill negotiation service.

In 2019, Truebill raised $15 million in a Series B led by Eldridge. It was then that the company shifted to be more of a personal finance app, offering new services including bill pay, credit scores and a rewards program.

Now in 2020, the company has gained 1 million users, while people have saved approximately $100 million by utilizing Truebill’s features, Yahya Mokhtarzada said.

Truebill is in a crowded space that continues to grow. The U.S. personal finance software market was estimated to reach $343 million by 2026, according to Allied Market Research. Meanwhile, there are nearly 600 U.S.-based startups listed in Crunchbase’s database under the “personal finance” category, that have raised more than $13 billion in venture capital dollars to date.

Within that list are big players like SoFi, offering lending and wealth management services, which raised $2.5 billion in funding, as well as smaller startups like SubscriptMe, which offers a similar service to Truebill–track and discover subscriptions all in one place–but has not listed any venture capital fundraise.

Meanwhile, Mokhtarzada plans to “hire like crazy,” for his offices in Maryland, San Francisco and New York.

“We are pushing hard to grow our data science and engineering teams, which will also mean expanding the rest of the company for the growth,” he said. “We are also at the size now where brand building becomes a significant focus for us. We now have the resources to consciously define and build out the brand in terms of who we are and who people see us as.”

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias