MIT FinTech Conference Startup Competition
Innovators in lending, crypto, personal finance and more competed for a chance to win over $30K in prizes!
Today I'm recapping the Startup Competition that took place last weekend at the annual MIT FinTech Conference. A huge shout out to the student organizing team for running such a great event.
There was a full weekend of awesome panels and events, but the startup competition in particular had a ton of buzz this year. Over 100 applied for the opportunity to pitch, and this year there were eight exciting startups selected to compete for the chance to win $30,000 and be crowned the MIT FinTech Pitch Competition Winner. The competition was judged by a panel of industry experts from the sector, each of whom offered perspective and asked great questions to the founders. The criteria for pitching at this event included:
FinTech as the primary business focus, including, but not limited to, payments, lending, crypto, DeFi, insurance, and others
Equity funding less than or equal to US$ 5 million at the time of application
Post-product stage with at least an MVP running in production at the time of application
Total employee count of less than or equal to 20, inclusive of the founding team
Now to the fun part. Starting with the three winning teams, and in no particular order following, below are the eight FinTech startups that pitched and their visions for the future of FinTech!
Money 254
This year’s first place team was Money 254 who took home the grand prize of $30,000. Money 254 is building a better way for over 600M adults in Africa to compare and apply for financial products, starting with Kenyan market. In Kenya, there are over 500 different options for lending partners, and an additional 250 institutions competing for customer deposits. This makes searching for the right financial partners an arduous process.
Money 254 is essentially building a NerdWallet for Africa, which they estimate is a $4B opportunity. They've built an easy way for people to search and compare products, as well as begin to apply for these products digitally. Since launching in April Money 254 has had significant traction with 80,000 monthly active users. Their primary focus area to date has been loans , where they are saving customers nearly 80%. They have also signed five commercial partners across digital lending, micro finance, and commercial banking sectors. Congrats to Money 254 on winning the grand prize!
MiKashBoks
In second place taking home $10,000 was MiKashBoks, which is moving informal financing groups into the digital age. There are over 400M people who save and lend informally through small member groups of peers, and member groups manage a total of approximately $50B in value globally. These groups save small amounts weekly into a physical cashbox, borrow from that amount, and earn interest when others in their group borrow. These transactions are typically tracked on paper ledgers, which are hard to manage and do not allow the individuals to develop a trusted outside financial profile.
MiKashboks' app allows these peer groups to manage bookkeeping digitally, and build trusted financial profiles for their members. Transactions are also passed through the MiKashboks API into dashboards for NGO and financial sponsors, who can in turn build better products for these individuals. The app is offline first, meaning only one member in the group needs to have a low tech smart phone in order to track and manage transactions without even needing internet.
The company is currently monetizing in three ways 1) NGO partnerships who pay to monitor savings groups 2) Direct Consumers who, once able to obtain a loan application, pay a small commission fee to MiKashBoks and 3) Financial Partners who pay for access to the API. MiKashBoks launched in January and has already had exciting growth - with 100 groups and 2,500 users on the platform already. They have also signed agreements to expand member base to 100,000 in the next year!
Zumma
In third place taking home $5,000 was Zumma! In many areas of Latin America people are losing money every day because of inflation. In this region eight out of ten people save money, but less than 1% of them invest those savings. Zumma aims to solve this problem and is on a mission to empower all Latin Americans to grow and preserve their wealth by giving them access to digital investing tools.
Zumma allows customers to save and invest in global markets with no minimums. The app allows users to invest in diversified portfolios, interact with other users and financial advisors, and get rewarded for good financial behavior. Zumma monetizes the product by charging a flat fee of 1% of assets under management. They have initial traction with over 300 people on their waitlist and a 60% open rate on their daily newsletter. They have already partnered with a broker dealer and plan to launch in Mexico soon.
Finch
Putting money to work as an individual is hard, and unfortunately many individuals hold too much of their wealth in cash and face barriers to investing and building credit. Finch aims to solve this problem, by supercharging your existing checking account so you can live your best life.
Finch works by allowing customers to earn rewards, auto invest, and build credit without accruing debt. Finch allows customers to link an existing checking account and begin spending with the Finch rewards card. When customers spend, they earn up to 5% cash back (financed through subscription revenue) that is auto invested into a personalized portfolio to boost wealth accumulation. Customers can also set up lump sum or recurring investments, and as an SEC registered investment advisor Finch also provides personalized recommendations from Finch along the way. Most importantly, because customers can only spend money that is already in their checking account, they're able to build credit without taking on credit card debt.
Finch launched in November of 2020, and are currently live in beta with four thousand customers and a waitlist of over three hundred thousand individuals on social media.
CashEx
Migrants send about $80B to Africa each year, and about half of that comes from the US. But sending money to and from Africa is expensive. This is because Africa has the highest exchange fees in the world (~10%). Many new platforms advertise low fees, but simply hide fees within the exchange rates. CashEx solves for these issues by matching transactions so that money never crosses borders, creating free money transfers for migrants.
How does this work? An example - a migrant who has US Dollars in the US and wants to send them to Nigeria, is matched with a business in Africa and that has Naira and wants to send dollars to the US. These transactions are matched, and the US Dollars are sent from the migrants account to the business account, while the Naira would go from the businesses account to the migrants account. The dollars stay in the US, and the Naira stay in Nigeria.
CashEx doesn't charge migrants, and instead charges businesses a small 1% fee. More importantly, they've gained some exciting traction already having processed $402,850 for 621 users with their initial prototype. They also received a $30k Grant from the Social Innovation and Change Institute at Harvard, and secured Goodwin Procter to help navigate regulatory compliance. They have also secured a number of exciting B2B partners including PrepClass, MultiTexter.com, bhmUK, and formplus.
Opdefi
Many want to invest in crypto but don't know where to start, and barriers to entry for DeFi are particularly high. Opdefi is building a better way to invest in Crypto by creating a smart portfolio, unique to you, that is both simple and intuitive.
Opdefi gives individuals exposure to portfolios of ERC-20 tokens. They use research based portfolio construction and yield farming to create smart portfolios that automatically rebalance and lend out your assets to diversify risk and increase returns. Funds are stored securely in Opdefi's audited smart contracts, and they rebalance and lend on-chain so that individuals retain custody of their funds at all times. The company is taking a research based approach by creating educational content including blogs, articles, videos, and other open sourced research. Opdefi is currently pre-product, but has a bold vision to make safe, smart, digital asset portfolios available to everybody in the world.
Bitadx
There are over 100 million users of crypto currency in India. However, more than 60 million users face daily issues with India's top crypto exchanges and their banking partners. Bitadx makes money by charging investors a nominal fee for maintaining mining farms and low transaction fees on trading.
Bitadx is creating an exchange with a cloud mining system, where individuals can generate crypto mining income without having to invest in the infrastructure themselves. They’re also creating a crypto bank where they can deposit money and trade with their earnings. They currently have twenty customers to date, and revenue from last quarter is over $8,000. Bitadx currently has two engineers and are planning to hire 5-6 more employees.
Slyde
Many people are hard pressed to answer these basic questions like 'How many subscriptions do I have and how much am I spending on these?' In a subscription driven world, Slyde is a consumer FinTech company that saves consumers time and money by allowing them to track, manage, and pay their bills and subscriptions from a single place.
Slyde's mission is to drive wholistic financial wellness for consumers. Slyde has had recent success, including being admitted to the DCU FinTech Innovation Center in Boston and securing a bank partnership with Central Payments. They recently launched a private beta of dozens of users, and have a waitlist of over two thousand users they acquired without spending any money on marketing. Focusing on improving financial wellness broadly, Slyde plans to lead with subscriptions and ultimately embed financial products (like payments) natively within their system.
I hope you enjoyed reading about these exciting startups! If you want more of these recaps directly to your inbox, subscribe below. Up next I’ll be covering startup showcases at the MIT Sports Summit, the Sports Analytics Conference, and the Asia Business Conference.