At the age of 14, Jacklyn Rome noticed firsthand how divorce can affect households, and the way arguing about funds each throughout and after the method can affect youngsters.
The expertise caught along with her. As an grownup, after main new product launches at Uber and Blue Apron, Rome got here up with the idea behind her startup, Ensemble. The expense monitoring app quietly launched within the App Store in 2020 with the mission of decreasing stress amongst co-parents and ensuring youngsters’ wants aren’t negatively impacted by a divorce.
Today, Ensemble is popping out of stealth with $three million in seed funding from TTV Capital, Lerer Hippeau and Citi Ventures.
Put merely, Ensemble’s mission is to enhance the lives of co-parents and their youngsters by giving parents a streamlined means to observe shared bills.
“Most co-parents either figure out finances on their own ad hoc or rely on child support payments — however, child support only covers food, shelter and clothing, which is only half of the cost of raising a child,” Rome factors out. The different half of bills, together with medical payments, extracurricular actions, transportation, and many others., usually find yourself being mentioned by co-parents by way of textual content messages and spreadsheets.
Ensemble founder and CEO Jacklyn Rome. Image courtesy of Ensemble
Ensemble kicked off a six-month pilot in January 2020, when the credit-first model of the app went stay. In April 2020, the twin performance model — the place two parents may join their accounts — went stay.
Since its App retailer launch final spring, Ensemble has seen “strong organic growth and referrals” from its customers, in accordance to Rome. Ensemble’s customers, on common, are monitoring over $1,000 monthly in shared bills for his or her youngsters.
Roughly 30% of Ensemble’s downloads have been natural in individuals discovering the app within the App Store, she stated.
“Even in the most amicable divorces, money is the number one thing that divorced parents end up arguing about. In more contentious divorces, it often gets used as a power lever among two emotionally charged individuals with no other tools at their disposal,” Rome stated. “We set out to build a product that eases tense communication about shared finances and serves the nuanced needs of separated parents.”
For now, the app is free. Ensemble plans to start monetizing with using funds from its seed spherical.
Eventually, the corporate is planning to construct out a paid subscription mannequin. Over the long run, it’s additionally planning to broaden past being an expense monitoring app to providing a collection of economic merchandise and primarily banking merchandise, for issues like shared bank cards with tight spending controls, Rome advised TechCrunch.
“Ultimately, we want to help make sure that the children of divorced parents are not at a financial disadvantage when it comes to building for their financial future,” she stated.
Rome based Ensemble whereas she was an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at Co-Created, a enterprise studio primarily based in New York, with help and funding from Citi Ventures’ D10X program.
“A key insight that Citi had given us was that for them as a bank, it’s incredibly hard to acquire new customers because people don’t often change banks,” Rome stated. “One of the few times in life that people regularly change banks is when they get divorced. And that sparked the thought process around the pain points that people feel through their divorce, specifically as it relates to finances.”
Luis Valdich, managing director of enterprise investing at Citi Ventures, says the financial institution has been “tracking for some time” how the monetary wants of people have been evolving given societal developments, whereas on the similar time figuring out potential funding alternatives in startups that handle underserved wants.
“One growing gap is for divorced or separate parents to track and manage shared expenses,” Valdich stated. “Ensemble solves this problem by striking the optimal balance of delivering ease of use, visibility and empathy for modern co-parents, minimizing the need for back-and-forth communications. While it is early, we found its user experience to be substantially superior to the alternatives in the market, and Jacklyn brings a unique perspective on the challenge Ensemble is trying to solve.”
And whereas he couldn’t converse to particular plans between Citi and Ensemble, Valdich stated that Citi Ventures’ strategy has at all times been to spend money on firms with an eye fixed towards future collaborations.
“We are proud that the majority of our portfolio has been commercialized within Citi and/or with Citi clients and we will certainly explore opportunities for collaboration when mutually convenient for both parties, as we always do,” Valdich added.
Meanwhile, TTV Capital Partner Mark Johnson stated his agency has been investing in fintech for over 20 years and that it’s clear “people are craving digital tools to simplify communication and finances.”
He referred to as Ensemble’s app “a sleek and simple platform” that addresses these wants for co-parents.
