Monarch, a subscription-based platform that aims to help consumers plan and manage their financials, has raised $4.8m in seed funding led by Accel.
The round, which also included participation from SignalFire, brings the Mountain View-based startup’s total funding since its 2019 inception to $5.5m.
Co-founder and CEO Val Agostino, who was the first product manager on the team that built Mint.com, said, he realized that Americans“needed software solutions that went beyond just tracking and budgeting,” for a greater understanding of financial matters. “They needed help planning their financial future and understanding the tradeoffs between competing financial priorities,” he said.
Monarch aims to help people address those needs with software for people to outline their financial goals and then create a detailed, forward-looking plan toward achieving them. Monarch also offers a full suite of PFM tools, such as budgeting, reporting and investment analysis. “We then help customers track their progress against their plan and automatically course correct as their financial situation changes, which it always does,” Agostino said.
Monarch came out of private beta in early 2021 with apps for web, iOS and Android, and is priced at $9.99 per month or $89.99 per year. The startup intentionally opted to not be ad-supported or sell customers’ financial data.
Agostino said, “We felt that a subscription business model would best support that ethos and align our users’ interests with our own.” Since launching publicly, Monarch has been growing its paid subscriber base by about 9% per week.
Monarch launched at a time when financial uncertainty kept increasing in the wake of the pandemic. “As a result, we saw a lot of people make use of Monarch’s forecasting features to compare different ‘what if ‘scenarios such as switching jobs or moving to a different city or state,” Agostino said.
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