Personal Finance Startup Truebill Gets $15M In The Bank

To help you get better with money, Truebill doesn’t want to tell you to “buy less coffee.” Instead, the Washington D.C-based startup wants to help you save money by cancelling subscriptions and tracking spending, according to Yahya Mokhtarzada, the co-founder and chief revenue officer of the company.

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Mission in mind, Truebill just raised $15 million in a Series B led by Eldridge Industries. Evolution VC also participated in the round, along with a slew of investors from its Series A, including Cota Capital, Lucas Venture Group, and Jawed Karim, the co-founder of YouTube, who contributed $5 million of the round.

The startup’s total known funding to date is $21.9 million, according to Crunchbase.

How It Works

Truebill claims that it has saved $50 million dollars for over half a million users since launching. To start using the app, a user connects their bank account. Then, Truebill analyze transactions and categorizes them. A user can swipe through potential subscriptions to cancel, upcoming bill charges, as well as spending month over month. The application additionally pulls out spending trends, and helps users create a budget with feedback from the company.

But giving your bank data to a startup is becoming an increasingly uncomfortable transaction to swallow for consumers, in the wake of data and privacy woes across many industries.

Mokhtarzada, knowing this, told me that “at a company level, we’re never going to sell data.”

“There are other companies that will aggregate data to sell to third parties, and we don’t sell data period,” he said.

What’s Ahead

With its fresh capital, Truebill is launching three new products: Bill Pay, Credit Scores, and a rewards program. The new product launch, along with a budgeting tool, puts the personal finance startup in crowded company.

There are over 1,054 startups in Crunchbase data listed under the personal finance category, raising a total over over $18.7 billion in venture capital dollars to date. There are the big ones like Credit Karma, which has raised $868 million in funding, and Coinbase, which has raised $547 million in venture funding. And there’s also the smaller startups like Stackin, a digital finance entertainment company, or TrackMySubs, which, similar to Truebill, helps users keep track of subscriptions but has raised no known venture-funding.

There’s also an acquired unicorn in the room: Mint, a Mountain View-based budgeting startup that was bought by Intuit for $170 million in 2009. While it shows that startups like Truebill can get scooped up by another bigger company looking to broaden out offerings, Truebill’s Mokhtarzada is quick to differentiate between what Truebill and the former startup are doing.

Mint, he said,“floundered as a product.”

“What makes us different [from Mint] is that we make sure the data is categorized correctly,” he said, calling out Mint’s flaws in processing charges for the wrong category. For example, if a coffee expensive is categorized under home goods budget, a user can be thrown off  “We have a data team to make sure the data is correct.”

Everyone is at a different stage of their financial life and well being, and for those of us that are looking to start saving – an app that makes us do that without much thought is appealing.

So with new cash in the bank, Truebill might just help us keep better track of our own.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias