US-based savings and investing app Acorns has raised $300m from private investors at a valuation of $1.9bn, reported CNBC.
The Series F funding round was led by private equity firm TPG and joined by Bain Capital Ventures, BlackRock, Galaxy Digital, and Brooklyn Nets star Kevin Durant’s investment firm.
Founded in 2012, Acorns allows its customers to invest spare change from card transactions into a managed portfolio of ETFs.
The platform is said to have 4.6 million customers at present.
The fresh capital will be used by the firm to further expand its family-focused products. It also plans to introduce new products and contents that drive its portfolio customisation and launch additional crypto offerings.
Acorns CEO Noah Kerner told CNBC: “We believe that the convergence of product and education in money is the way to get people engaged in better behaviours.
“It’s difficult to get people to read about money in the first place, it’s even more difficult to get people to retain the information. And we think active learning is the solution to that.”
Acorns’ fundraise comes shortly after it scrapped plan to go public in January this year via a $2.2bn SPAC deal with Pioneer Merger Corp.
Kerner said: “The concerns we had about the SPAC market were that we would get lumped into a group of companies that perhaps were valuing themselves in inflated ways.”
He also added that Acorns will go public ‘when the markets return to being more welcoming to fintech listings’, through a traditional initial public offering.
Last month, Vietnam-based retail investment app Infina raked in $6m in a seed funding round to accelerate its growth.
