Online investing platform Acorns has raised $300m in Series F funding, propelling it to a $1.9bn valuation.
According to a report by CNBC, TPG led the Series F round with additional investors including BlackRock, Bain Capital Ventures, Galaxy Digital, and a firm created by Brooklyn Nets player Kevin Durant.
The funding follows the company’s announcement last year that it would go public via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). It later cancelled the deal at the beginning of the year, citing “marketing conditions.â€
Founded in 2012, Acorns is an automated investing service that lets customers invest spare change from card transactions into a managed portfolio of ETFs for a monthly fee of $3 to $5. The firm says it has 4.6 million customers.
The company said it will use its funding to further build out its family-specific offerings, products and content that increase portfolio personalisation and new crypto offerings.
Speaking of the cancelled SPAC, Noah Kerner, CEO of Acorns, said, “The markets got very volatile… The concerns we had about the [SPAC] market were that we would get lumped into a group of companies that perhaps were valuing themselves in inflated ways.â€
Of the new funding, he said, “We believe that the convergence of product and education in money is the way to get people engaged in better behaviours. It’s difficult to get people to read about money in the first place, it’s even more difficult to get people to retain the information. And we think active learning is the solution to that.â€
When the markets return to being more welcoming to fintech listings, Acorns will go public — but via a traditional IPO, Kerner added.
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