Finance

Personal finance app Monarch raises $75 million

Published

7 hours ago

May 23, 2025

Business Finance News

Monarch co-founders (left to right) Ozzie Osman, Jon Sutherland, Val Agostino.

Courtesy: Monarch

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.

Personal finance app Monarch, which has raised a $75 million series B investment.

Courtesy: Monarch

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.”

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Published

3 hours ago

May 23, 2025

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Finance

Goolsbee says Fed now has to wait longer before moving rates because of trade policy uncertainty

Published

6 hours ago

May 23, 2025

Business Finance News

Chicago Fed President Goolsbee: Bar is higher for Fed action as we await clarity on trade policy

Chicago Federal Reserve President Austan Goolsbee said Friday that President Donald Trump’s latest tariff threats have complicated policy and likely put off changes to interest rates.

In a CNBC interview, the central bank official indicated that while he still sees the direction of rates being lower, the Fed likely will be on hold as it evaluates the ever-changing trade policy and how it impacts inflation and employment.

“Everything’s always on the table. But I feel like the bar for me is a little higher for action in any direction while we’re waiting to get some clarity,” Goolsbee said on “Squawk Box” when asked about Trump’s new actions Friday morning. “Over the longer run, if they’re putting in place tariffs that have a stagflationary impact … then that’s the central bank’s worst situation.”

“So I think we’ll have to see how big the impacts on prices are,” he added. “I know people hate inflation.”

Goolsbee spoke as Trump jolted markets again with a call for 50% tariffs on products from the European Union starting June 1 while indicating Apple will have to pay a 25% tariff on iPhones not made in the U.S. Apple mostly makes its coveted smartphones in China, though there is some production in India as well.

While the impact of a costlier iPhone likely wouldn’t mean much from a larger economic perspective, the saber-ratting underscores the volatility of trade policy and provides another flash point for a market already unnerved by worries about fiscal policy that have sent bond yields sharply higher.

Central bankers are generally careful not to wade into issues of fiscal and trade policy, but are left to analyze their repercussions.

Goolsbee said he is still optimistic that the longer-run trajectory is towards solid economic growth before Trump’s April 2 tariff announcement that rattled markets.

“I’m still underneath hopeful that we can get back to that environment, and 10 to 16 months from now, rates could be a fair bit below where they are today,” he said.

Goolsbee is a voting member this year on the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee, which next meets June 17-18. At the meeting, officials will get a chance to update their economic and interest rate projections. The last update, in March, saw the committee indicating two rate cuts this year.

Markets expect the Fed will cut twice this year, with the next move not happening until September. Goolsbee did not commit to a course of action from here amid the uncertainty.

“I don’t like even mildly tying our hands at the next meeting, much less over six, eight, 10 meetings from now,” he said. “That said, as we went into April 2, I believe that we’re at pretty stable full employment, that inflation was on a path back to 2% and if we could do those I thought that over the next 12 to 18 months, rates could come down a fair amount.”

The Fed’s benchmark overnight borrowing rate is targeted between 4.25%-4.5%, where it has been since December. The actual rate most recently traded at 4.33%.