With Portland startup Bumped, buying stuff can also have you buying stock

You don’t hear as much about it as I would like, but I love the small and scrappy fintech startup community in Portland. What started with companies like Simple has spawned any number of interesting takes on banking, financing, and investing. Even the cofounder of Acorns — which enables folks to round up purchase prices to invest small increments of money — has a Portland connection. (He graduated from Lewis & Clark.) So you can imagine my excitement when I heard that Giftango founder David Nelsen was getting back in the startup game with a fintech play. And now, it’s come out of stealth. Meet Bumped.

Bumped is a new technology that gives you fractional shares of stock when you spend with your favorite participating brands. Brokerage services provided by Bumped Financial, LLC, member FINRA/SIPC.

So with Bumped, when you buy stuff from companies that have publicly traded stock, you’re also investing in that company. You actually get a chunk of the brands that you use. It’s a slight tweak on some of the current investing app models. But I think that tweak is a really important one.

Theoretically, this seems like a great opportunity for some win-win virtuous cycle stuff. You buy from the brand, which makes the brand perform better, which may, in turn, cause their stock price to go up, which could provide you with more capital to buy stuff from that brand… And if that works out, then Bumped wins too.

Super excited to see where this goes.

For more information or to sign up for the beta, visit Bumped.

Originally published at siliconflorist.com on April 13, 2018.