Intuit is shutting down its budgeting app Mint this week, which is good news for rival Copilot. Founder Andres Ugarte told TechCrunch that Mint's demise marks the end of an era and proof that consumers expect more from the company's financial apps.
The New York-based CEO launched a subscription-based personal finance tracker in January 2020 to provide an alternative to Mint. Copilot currently has over 100,000 subscribers, the majority of whom use the app at least once a day. Some users use the app multiple times a week, and Ugarte considers his 20% of users to be “heavy users,” who use Copilot five to 10 times a day.
“This is good for apps that are not social networks,” Ugarte said.
Copilot calculates that users save an average of 5% after they start using the app. While this may not seem like a lot, Ugarte points out that for someone who makes, say, $100,000, that's the equivalent of $5,000 a year. Multiplied by 100,000 users, the app is putting $500 million back into consumers' wallets, he said.
beyond mint
Like millions of others, Ugarte tried several personal finance apps, including Mint, but found them inadequate. For example, Mr. Ugarte paid monthly rental fees, and Mr. Mint flagged them to alert him monthly that large purchases had been made. However, it didn't tell me what the purchase was actually about, just a notification to log in and see what was going on.
“Mint was revolutionary when it launched, but eventually the app fell asleep at the wheel,” Ugarte said. “Other startups offered alternatives, but when they launched, they looked like mint, but with fresh paint.”
Trying out these apps also helped Ugarte understand how tedious it can be to connect accounts. Copilot users connect an average of 10 individual accounts. Therefore, he wanted to create an app that would ingest all the data and reward users for making sense of it.
Other personal finance apps will show you where you're spending, even in unrelated categories. Copilot analyzes activity, including recurring payments, and allows users to view their preferred 5-10 budget score categories to see how they're doing in terms of spending and saving.
Mint user acquisition
Ugarte was among a number of finance app founders, including Monarch Money co-founder Ozzie Osman, to follow Intuit's Nov. 2 announcement that Mint would shut down on March 23. told me that Mint's loss was their gain. For CoPilot, its November announcement date was “the biggest day ever,” Ugarte said.
That growth is unstoppable, he says. The company has grown more in the past four months than it has in the previous four years. CoPilot was able to leverage that growth into a $6 million Series A round led by Nico Wittenborn and Adjacent. Wittenborn previously invested in companies including Revolut, Calm, Niantic, PhotoRoom and BeReal.
TechCrunch also reported on Copilot when it first launched with $250,000 in angel funding and later when it added support for Apple Card. This new investment gives Copilot a total of $10.5 million in venture-backed funding.
The company reached profitability in 2023, but more customers were asking for an Android app so they could share it with family and friends. Copilot has been an iOS app since its launch. Ugarte decided to take advantage of the opportunity and set his sights on a new capital.
In addition to hiring to build Android and web capabilities, Copilot will accelerate its AI and product development efforts.
“We've done a lot of machine learning over the years, and now our users are exporting data from Copilot to ChatGPT and saying they're having conversations about finance,” Ugarte said. I did. “It makes sense for us to provide that experience so they can get accurate information.”
Ugarte didn't give an exact date for when the new features would be released, but said the goal is by the end of the year.