Alinea Invest, a fintech app that offers AI-powered wealth management aimed at Gen Z women, has secured $3.4 million in seed funding ahead of the launch of an AI virtual assistant to help users with their investment needs. The fundraising comes after 225,000 downloads of Alinea’s app, bringing in $1.8 million in revenue, allowing the New York startup’s six-person team to operate profitably.
Founded in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Alinea was created by co-founders Anam Lakhani and Eva Halimias well as CTO Daniel Nissenbaum who met at Barnard College and Columbia University. Lakhani and Halimi, now co-CEOs, had interned on Wall Street, but faced a similar pain point when it came to money: They didn’t know how to invest better. This idea led to creating a business plan for an app while taking an entrepreneurship class at school. Later, the founders headed to full-time jobs in investment banking and a growth-stage startup when COVID hit.
The pandemic finally freed up more time for the team to work on their app, so they applied to startup accelerator Y Combinator in 2021 and got in.
“The pain point that we’ve seen is that people like us who are young women, Gen Zs, children of immigrants, have no idea where to start. Financial literacy is a huge pain point across the United States,” notes Lakhani. “We wanted to create an alternative platform that was truly personalized, taught you how to build your wealth, and we did it for you.”
Eva Halimi in orange and Anam Lakhani. Image Credits:: Alinea Invest
The app, which is described as “Wealthfront meets Robinhood”, is built with a Gen Z audience in mind. This includes a heavy focus on an accessible design to make investing seem less intimidating. The goal is to attract users as they just leave college and enter the workforce or earn their first paychecks, helping them then automate their portfolio. This differentiates Alinea from other female-focused fintechs such as Ellevest.
Many users start with Alinea’s automated investment model, but later take advantage of the option to buy and sell stocks as they become more sophisticated investors.
However, unlike Robinhood and some others, Alinea operates on a subscription business model that costs $120 per year.
Another factor that differentiates Alinea is its playlists. These allow users to create their own instant indexes — in a way somewhat similar to music curation on Spotify. Today, Alinea investors have tailored their own ETFs around topics such as climate change, female leadership, artificial intelligence, fashion and even abortion rights. Every day, users create thousands of playlists and these can also be shared with others.
Image Credits: Alinea Invest
The company has so far been successful in acquiring users through content marketing, particularly on TikTok, where the founders talk about investments and their startup journey. To date, their following has driven over 100 million views on their hashtags on the short video platform, the founders told TechCrunch.
With its $3.4 million seed round, Alinea is looking to go further into the AI market with the launch of an AI financial advisor. While the app already leverages a combination of artificial intelligence and expert advisors to make stock recommendations, the new feature, which will roll out later this year, will offer an interactive way to ask for investment help.
The AI assistant will be connected to a new subscription.
“There will be an additional elite tier, essentially, where it will be like a kind of AI copilot — an AI financial advisor that will answer all your questions. . . that are very personalized to you,” notes Halimi.
The AI will consider a variety of factors when answering questions, such as the user’s age, risk tolerance, historical background and more. The team expects to launch the feature around Q2 or Q3 this year, they said.
Although competition is fierce in the fintech space, Alinea believes they can capture a specific demographic – the younger Gen Z investor and mostly women (80% of the app’s users are women). The average Alinea investor makes $80,000 a year and is about 22 to 24 years old.
The new funding was led by F7 Ventures and GFR and are included Business of working life (Bree Kimmel), FoundersX Fund, Gaingelsand co-founder of Dropbox Arash Ferdowsi. Alinea previously raised a $2.3 million pre-seed round from Goodwater, Kima Ventures, Harvard, Diaspora and former Robinhood employees. The founders have not joined the board with the new capital, but rather plan to invest in further product development, including copilot AI, personalization and other educational initiatives.
“Financial literacy and investing is a critical path to wealth and financial stability for women and Gen Z,” said Kelly Graziadei, general partner of F7. “We are proud to invest in Eve and Anam as they build AI-powered investing with Alinea – making it easier and more accessible than ever for people to invest according to their interests and values. We can’t think of a better team to pave the way for a new generation of wealth creation,” he added.
