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Robinhood's companion

Maybe you can eat avocado toast and invest your money, too.

We’re not here to start a generational debate — just to point out that Millennials and Gen Z are better at managing their money than some thought. One of the main reasons is tech. For example, nearly 3x as many young people use online apps to invest versus older generations.

Two new products are helping tech users up their game even more.

Monarch, a personal finance app, launched last month. Its co-founder, Val Agostino, knows the space well — he was the first product manager on the original team that built Mint.com (acquired by Intuit).

Agostino told TechCrunch that he saw firsthand how tools help people gain an understanding of financial matters, but believes people need solutions beyond tracking and budgeting.

Monarch’s goal is to move beyond historically recording finances, to providing tools for proactively planning them. Other differentiators include a subscription-based (ad-free) model, multi-player accounts (e.g. access for you and your partner), and a promise of superior data with multiple aggregators. The startup just raised $4.8M in seed funding.

Today’s launch of Finexy is all about empowering savvy financial decision making, too.

In his introduction, founder Vik Raghavan identified a gap between “sentiment traders (think: trending social media stock) to long-term value investors”, noting the latter usually yield better returns. His answer: a “companion app for Robinhood.”

Finexy acts as your personalized analyst to help you identify winning stocks and portfolios. It leverages financial theory and research frameworks that investors like Buffett use, but done via robot.

The launch is aptly timed. Robinhood is set to IPO later this week it and it plans to sell as much as 35% of its shares directly to customers on its app (compared to the usual 1-2%).

Short arms, high jump
“I made this small Dino game around six months ago. I was exploring the Web Speech APIs and wondered why not make a game where you yell jump to make the T-Rex jump.”
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Our ultra-fast Daily: Three takes on new products. Yesterday’s top ten launches. That’s it.