Personal finance app Monarch raises $75 million despite ‘nuclear winter’ for fintech startups

The personal finance startup Monarch has raised $75 million to accelerate subscriber growth that took off last year when budgeting tool Mint was shut down, CNBC has learned.

The fundraising is among the largest for an American consumer fintech startup this year and values the San Francisco-based company at $850 million, according to co-founder Val Agostino. The Series B round was led by Forerunner Ventures and FPV Ventures.

Monarch aims to provide an all-in-one mobile app for tracking spending, investments and money goals. The field was once dominated by Mint, a pioneer in online personal finance that Intuit acquired in 2009. After the service languished for years, Intuit closed it in early 2024.

“Managing your money is one of the big unsolved problems in consumer technology,” Agostino said in a recent Zoom interview. “How American families manage their money is still basically the same as it was in the late 90s, except today we do it on our phones instead of walking into a bank.”

Monarch, founded in 2018, saw its subscriber base surge by 20 times in the year after Intuit announced it was closing Mint as users sought alternatives, according to Agostino.

Unlike Mint, which was free, Monarch relies on paying subscribers so that the company doesn’t need to focus on advertising from credit-card issuers or sell users’ data, said Agostino, who was an early product manager at Mint.

The startup aimed to make onboarding accounts and expense tracking easier than rival tools, some of which are free or embedded within banking apps, according to FPV co-founder Wesley Chan.

Chan said that Monarch reminds him of previous bets that he has made, including his stake in graphic design platform Canva, in that Agostino is tackling a difficult market with a fresh approach.

“What Val is doing, it’s the successor to anything that’s been done in financial planning,” Chan said. “It’s frictionless, it’s easy to use and it’s easy to share, which is something that never existed before. That’s why he’s growing so quickly, and why the engagement numbers are so high.”

The company’s round comes amid a period of muted interest for most U.S. fintechs that cater directly to consumers. Monarch is one of the few firms to raise a sizeable Series B; other recent examples include Felix, a money remittance service for Latino immigrants.

Fintech firms raised $1.9 billion in venture funding in the first quarter, a 38% decline from the fourth quarter that “signals deepening investor caution toward B2C models,” according to a recent PitchBook report. Roughly three-quarters of all the venture capital raised in the quarter went to companies in the enterprise fintech space, PitchBook said.

“The sector is still in nuclear winter” as it faces a hangover from 2021-era startups that “raised way too much money and had zero progress and wrecked it for everybody else,” Chan said. “That’s fine with me, I love nuclear-winter sectors.”