Top Personal Finance Startups in 2026

PayJoy's mission is to deliver access to credit to the next billion people in emerging markets worldwide. Our unique mobile security technology creates collateral that enables customers to afford their first smartphone on credit and then allows them further access to credit to help weather life's unexpected financial surprises and climb the ladder of economic well-being. Founded in 2015, today PayJoy has reached hundreds of thousands of customers in a dozen countries around the globe, from Mexico to Indonesia, India, Kenya, and Nigeria, and is on a strong growth path with support from major industry partners to bring credit to millions in 2019.

Founded by ex-Googlers, we are the first artificial intelligence lending platform designed to improve access to affordable credit while reducing the risk and costs of lending for our bank partners. By leveraging our AI platform, the company's powered banks can have higher approval rates and lower loss rates, while simultaneously delivering the exceptional digital-first lending experience their customers demand. Our company goes beyond FICO, using non-conventional variables at scale to provide superior loan performance and improve consumers' access to credit.

DriveWealth is a financial technology firm pioneering embedded finance, fractional investing in US equities, and API-driven brokerage infrastructure. We’ve built patent-pending technology to fractionalize US equities and were the first to receive a license to do so in 2015. We help banks, fintechs, RIAs, and global brands build investing experiences in 153 countries. Some of our partners are Revolut, Hatch, MoneyLion, Stake, and Avenue.

Our first product is a consumer lending app that underwrites customers in real time using thousands of alternative data signals. Anyone with an Android smartphone in our markets can apply for a loan and receive an instant decision, regardless of their financial history. We provide fast, personalized loans to approved borrowers and help customers build a digital credit history, or financial identity, over time. Only 31% of the adult population globally is covered by credit bureaus. In markets where bureaus are limited or nonexistent, Tala can use nontraditional data to can score up to 2X that population – introducing 3 billion consumers to the global market. The data that we look at include social connections, texts and calls, merchant transactions, app usage, and personal identifiers. These signals serve as a proxy for traditional financial data, helping us verify identity and assess creditworthiness.

Public.com is an investing app that makes the stock market social. By building a transparent community of investors and offering fractional shares of thousands of publicly-traded companies, we’re on a mission to make the public markets work for everyone. With interest in the stock market surging among a new generation of investors, our community is growing rapidly, and we recently reached our 1MM member milestone just 18 months after launching. To support our ambitious goals, our team is growing and we’re looking for sharp, enthusiastic people who believe in our mission to fundamentally change the way people invest. We announced our Series D funding round of $220 million in Feb. 2021, just two months after our Series C round. Our investors include Accel, Greycroft (the original investors in Venmo) and Lakestar as well as Will Smith (Dreamers VC), Tony Hawk, The Chainsmokers’ Mantis VC; NFL star J.J. Watt, NYU Stern professor and entrepreneur Scott Galloway, business executive Dick Parsons, Business Class founder Sophia Amoruso, and Shari Redstone’s Advancit Capital.

Farther is the leading technology-centric wealth management firm – empowering expert advisors with cutting-edge technology to deliver an efficient, comprehensive, and elite client experience. The fastest-growing RIA in the country, Farther manages over $5b in assets across 100+ wealth managers and 5,000 clients. Join a team of people who care—about the work, about each other, and about building a generational financial institution that helps people achieve their goals.

Betterment is the largest independent online financial advisor with more than $20 billion in assets under management. The service is designed to help increase customers’ long-term returns and lower taxes for retirement planning, building wealth, and other financial goals. Betterment takes advanced investment strategies and uses technology to deliver them to more than 480,000 customers across its three business lines: direct-to-consumer, Betterment for Advisors, and Betterment for Business. Learn more.

Founded in 2005 as the first peer-to-peer marketplace lending platform in the U.S., Prosper was built on a simple idea: connect people who want to borrow money with those who want to invest. Since inception, Prosper has helped more than a million people gain access to affordable credit with over $19 billion in loans originated through its platform. Our mission is to help our customers advance their financial well-being through a variety of products including personal loans, home equity lines of credit (HELOC) and the upcoming launch of our first credit card product. Our diverse culture rewards accountability and cross functional teamwork because we believe this encourages innovative thinking and helps us deliver on our mission. We’re on a mission to hire the very best, and we are committed to creating exceptional employee experiences where everyone is respected and has access to equal opportunity. We realize that new ideas can come from everywhere. It is important to us that every hire connects with our vision, mission, and core values. Join a leading fintech company that’s democratizing finance for all!

Credit Karma is a truly free credit service that provides credit score access, financial education, and money saving recommendations based a consumer’s credit profile. Credit Karma’s mission is to provide more access, transparency, and education around financial services through technology and innovation.

Americans have more debt than they do savings. We believe that debt shouldn’t hold people back in life, so we started Spinwheel to democratize intelligent debt solutions. Spinwheel provides the core infrastructure that popular apps and services can use to embed the payment, management, and application of loans. By increasing access, choice, and transparency, Spinwheel helps to alleviate the burdens of living with debt and improve outcomes for all borrowers. Spinwheel makes it easy to offer full-featured debt use cases in any app or service, starting with student loan debt. Read and write consumer debt API's and drop-in modules offer robust and comprehensive capabilities not available anywhere else. As the leader in embedded consumer debt tech, our customers launch in hours with our no-code drop-in modules and build custom solutions quickly with our modern APIs and developer tools.