Emma, the personal finance management app that bills itself as your best “financial friend,” has raised $2.5 million in seed funding.
Connect Ventures led the round, with participation from Ithaca Investments, Tiny.vc and existing investor, Aglaé Ventures. The fintech previously raised $700,000 in angel funding in June 2018.
Launched in the U.K. in early 2018 — and most recently expanding to the U.S. and Canada — the Emma app connects to your bank accounts (and crypto wallets) to help you budget, track spending and save money.
It aims to let you understand how much money you have left to spend until payday, track and find wasteful subscriptions or alert you when you are paying over the odds on utility bills, and preemptively help you avoid going into your bank’s overdraft.
For those who like to be more hands-on with tracking their finances, Emma also offers a paid subscription version of its app dubbed “Emma Pro”. It lets you do additional things like create custom categories, add emojis to custom categories, export your data between specified time ranges, create manual accounts in any currency, create manual transactions, and split transactions,
“In a world where 70% of mental health issues are derived by financial problems, Emma is defining a new category, financial therapy,” says Emma founder and CEO Edoardo Moreni. “Our mission is to remove anxiety regarding money matters and bring instant gratification whenever our users interact with money regardless of their financial situation”.
Noteworthy, Connect Ventures is also an investor in open banking platform TrueLayer, which Emma uses to power its account aggregation in the U.K. (it uses Plaid in the U.S.). Describing TrueLayer as the “infrastructure layer,” Connect’s Rory Stirling says Emma represents investing in the “application layer” – perhaps as it is just the kind of app open banking promised.
“The team at Emma have built a product people love and as a result they have the highest engagement and retention we’ve seen in this category,” he says in a statement. “That’s really exciting to us – better tools for financial education and empowerment are only valuable if people engage with them”. (Users open the app on average five times a week, twice a day).
“We have about 200,000 users now and are growing pretty fast in the U.S., Canada and U.K.,” Moreni tells me. “We’ll be launching in every english speaking country and we’ll raise our Series A in the next 12 months. If you think about it, every single generation in history had a tracker. At Emma, we want to become the abacus for the modern world”.
