Orum Banks On $5.2M Seed Round For Money-Moving Platform

Orum wants to make moving money in real time less of a headache and more a function of everyday life.

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The New York-based company is developing a platform that creates instant wallets, and raised its first institutional funding: An oversubscribed seed round of $5.2 million led by Homebrew and a slate of top investors, including Inspired Capital, Acrew, Bain Capital Ventures, Clocktower and BoxGroup, as well as angel investors.

As a certified financial planner, founder and CEO Stephany Kirkpatrick wants to shift the thinking around money movement from where the consumer figures out in which account money needs to flow, to one where everything is managed for the consumer.

Enter Orum’s debut product, Foresight, an automated programming interface aimed at enabling financial institutions to move money in real time. The platform uses machine learning and data science to predict when funds are available and if there is any fraud pattern—kind of like a pre-authorization.

“Foresight unlocks money immediately and eliminates the risk,” Kirkpatrick told Crunchbase News. “We’ve become an instant economy everywhere else but in the banking industry, where you can’t invest your money immediately. It’s a vicious cycle for access to your money.”

Kirkpatrick opened and closed the seed round during the pandemic. With the new funding, Orum is building a team, preparing for the Foresight launch, and expanding its use cases. The company is now working with 50 customers and has a waiting list, she said.

The company also doubled its employee count, including bringing in CTO Ryan Cooke, VP of Data Science Christine Hurtubise, and Alexa von Tobel, who is chairman of Orum’s board and managing partner of Inspired Capital.

Kirkpatrick worked with Von Tobel, founder of LearnVest, and came up with the idea for Orum last October while discussing ways to improve the financial system for Americans. Von Tobel put the first capital into Orum as an “inspiration check,” von Tobel said in an interview.

“Stephany is the most talented, sharp, highly technical person with an incredibly strong skill set of being a certified financial planner with decades of knowledge around working with money,” she said. “Inspired Capital was the first investor, writing our promise on the back of a napkin. We see Orum as an opportunity for a way to move money that will unlock incredible potential in the way people think about money.”

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias