Announcing The Cohort: Finance Forward US 2019

We’re excited to announce the full cohort for the 2019 class of our Finance Forward US 2019 accelerator. Scroll down to the bottom to see the full list of companies.

Finance Forward US 2019 is part of Finance Forward, a multi-year global coalition led by founding partners MetLife Foundation, PayPal, and Village Capital to support entrepreneurs on four continents who are building tech-enabled solutions to place-based challenges around financial health, economic mobility, and community resilience.

According to the US Financial Health Pulse survey, only 28% of people in the United States are considered to be “financially healthy”. We’re excited about the growing number of entrepreneurs working on all different aspects of financial health, including helping people and SMEs stabilize their income, get access to affordable credit, reduce debt, grow wealth, and save for the future.

We selected this year’s cohort from a total of more than 100 applicants, evaluating each startup that applied on criteria including team, business model, and product-market fit. The selection process involved a diverse Advisory Board that included investors, entrepreneurs and financial industry leaders, but also academics and activists who spoke to the challenges at hand.

The strength of this cohort lies in its diversity. We’re relentlessly focused on supporting founders with lived experience in the problems they’re solving because we believe they create stronger companies. This year, 55% of the startups have a female founder or co-founder, 55% have a Black and/or Latinx founder, and 73% are headquartered outside of New York, Boston, or San Francisco/Bay Area (where over 75% of VC is deployed). Further, 55% are actively exploring expansion across the Americas — not just the US.

Participating startups will receive intensive feedback from both mentors and peers at two workshops this October in Miami and November in New York City. They will make connections with investors, potential customers, and industry experts. In addition to external mentorship from a wide network of sector leaders, entrepreneurs will receive targeted, skills-based support from experts at MetLife and PayPal on topics like product development, strategic partnerships, and more.

Here are the eleven startups in the cohort that are improving financial health in the United States:

1. Bond.ai (Little Rock, AR) is an AI platform for banks whose Empathy Engine™ helps banks intimately understand user behavior and nudge customers towards improved financial health.
2. Edquity (Brooklyn, NY) supports students through every financial obstacle on the road to college graduation with its cash-flow management, emergency resource referral and emergency aid platform for college students, and an emergency aid management platform for higher education institutions.
3. EnrichHER (Atlanta, GA) is a lending platform that connects revenue-generating women- led businesses and ventures with up to $250K in non-dilutive capital.
4. Everyday Life (Boston, MA) uses technology to make it easy for everyday people to get personalized insurance that is more effective and less expensive than traditional, one-size-fits-all solutions.
5. Flourish Savings (Berkeley, CA) helps financially excluded people establish savings habits and achieve financial security by making saving money feel like play.
6. Qoins (Atlanta, GA) is a financial wellness app that helps consumers pay off their debt faster, by combining financial education and automation.
7. SendMi (Lehi, UT) is a global flex-pay solution that integrates with employer’s payroll system, allowing employees to send money back to their home countries, top up phones and pay international bills.
8. Uulala (Ontario, CA) is a mobile blockchain-powered fintech company and neo bank in Mexico seeking to provide a complete financial ecosystem designed to serve underbanked communities.
9. Worthy Financial (Boca Raton, FL) is a platform that helps customers grow wealth through community-based investments.
10. Xendoo (Fort Lauderdale, FL) is a cloud-based, flat-rate, monthly subscription providing bookkeeping and accounting to small businesses with fewer than 20 employees.
11. ZayZoon (Calgary, Alberta, Canada) is an HRTech company that partners and integrates with payroll companies to provide employees with financial wellness tools such as wages-on-demand, financial literacy and responsible banking solutions.

Marcia Chong Rosado is Manager of the Financial Innovation Practice at Village Capital.

Village Capital operates the most active financial health accelerator in the world, with 22 past accelerators and bootcamps that have supported more than 200 startups. We were recently named Best Fintech Accelerator by Finovate.