Acorns Co-Founder Raises $ 20 Million For Micro-Investing Applications

Cruttenden founded the Acorns microinvestment app with his son Jeff in 2012 before launching in 2018 Blast, a startup that allows gamers to link their gaming activity to their bank accounts so they can save while they are playing. are playing.

Now he and his co-founder Michael Gleason have raised $ 20 million from Franklin Venture Partners, RX3 Ventures, SteelBridge Laboratories and Steelpoint Capital Partners, for his latest venture, Ant Money.

Along with the increase, Ant Money completed the acquisition of Blast through a share merger, bringing together three separate applications under the Ant Money umbrella: ATM, Blast and Learn & Earn.

The ATM app helps users generate micro-income to participate in brand matching and provide consumer information to partner businesses. This money is then invested in the stock market through Ant Money Advisors, a wholly-owned SEC-registered investment adviser and robo-advisor built into the app.

Blast allows players to earn and save for playing, while the Learn & Earn app, developed in collaboration with Junior Achievement USA, also helps people earn money to learn new skills and then invest automatically. on the market.

Gleason, who is the CEO of Ant, said: “Ant Money and Blast had similar visions to help people enter the world of financial investing as well as overlapping management, and as we started to work together and integrating the Ant Money investment platform into the ATM app, and the Blast Gaming and Learn & Earn apps, it seemed like the next logical step was to merge the companies and create a bigger whole. ”