Penny raises $1.2M

What does Penny do?
Penny, is mobile personal finance app. This fin app offers a chat based interface which offers advice tailored to the customers personal finances. The advice the app providers includes things such as how the person has to spend on food each week, how his/her month’s spending compares to the previous month and even provides income graphs. A unique things about this app is that it only lets the person send pre-populated messages, not natural language requests. The company has implemented this features so that the user will not be forced to figure out not just what they want to ask, but also how it should be asked so that the bot undrstands it. This app is currently only available for the Android and iOS based mobile operating systems. But the co-founder of Penny, Mitchell Lee, noted that they would definitely consider placing their bot on a social platform such as Facebook Messenger, but not yet because the startup cannot see a clear value proposition yet about offering the app on other platforms. The reason behind this is the young platforms are not developed enough for completely supporting the company’s key features such as pre-populated responses and password entry.

How much Penny was funded?
The company raised $1.2M on May 23, 2016 from Social Capital.

What is next for Penny?
Penny plans to use the funding for hiring a couple of people more for deepening their expertise in machine learning which is a very imprtant part of bot development. The funding will also help them in continuing with experimentation of figuring out how the company can provide better value to the users, as the app does not currently have any components of monetization.

More about Penny
The company was founded in July, 2015 by Alex Quach and Mitchell Lee. It has its headquarters in San Francisco, California. This personal fin app is taking the pain out of keeping track of the users finances. The company’s mission is to cut through complexity and tell the users what they must know, when they need to know. If it is your idea to save money, then this personal finance app available for iOS and Android users will provide actionable advice on how to save money. If a user needs help getting out of debt, this app will provide him the path to success. If you do not want either of these, then the app will just provide you fun and useful insights about other personal finance aspects.