Canadian FinTech startup, Wingocard which is based in Montreal has raised 2M CAD in July 2020 in a funding round, led by Diagram Ventures.
Capital raised will be used to develop its product and increase headcount, while also gaining more users to its current wait-list.
Wingocard is started and led by Sebastien Brault (CEO), Mehdi Mehni (head of product), and Salvatore D’Agostino (CTO), all of whom had worked together at former companies. Brault, a serial entrepreneur and angel investor, is particularly an investor in Nesto, a startup backed by Diagram Ventures. Mehni was the product lead for Diagram’s innovation team until August 2019.
Wingocard has created a personal finance platform fixated on teenagers. It offers a mobile banking App paired with a prepaid Visa card for teens, enabling parents to immediately transfer money and keep track of payments. The combo of the card and mobile App helps teens buy items from anywhere, as well as send and receive money between friends and family. Wingocard’s vision is to “empower” teens to take charge of their personal finance by developing strong financial literacy skills from a young age.
“We are excited to help bring Wingocard to families this summer,” said Francois Lafortune, CEO of Diagram, which is funded largely by Power Financial-backed Portag3 Ventures.
The idea for Wingocard came about from a tête-à-tête between Brault and Mehni, who was working at Diagram at the time. Both the co-founders have teenagers and the shared experience of the problems they faced with respect to managing the pocket money and spending of their children. Seeking an easy solution for giving their teens money without having to hand over their own credit card all the time, they realized that there was no strong teen-focused mobile banking solution in the market.
Brault was quoted to have said, “Our mission is to help connect teens to the cashless economy and give them access to the cashless economy with a really good banking experience, which does not exist for them right now.” The CEO also claimed that Wingocard has very few rivals. He said that the difference between mainstream mobile banking services and Wingocard is its focus on teens. “We speak to the teens first, our brand is built for teens,” said Brault. “At the same time, we solve the parent’s problem. Our competitors are usually talking to parents and trying to solve the parent’s problem by offering a solution for the parents, while we are really targeting teens.”
Wingocard is set to launch in the US in alpha version over the next few months, with plans to launch in beta by the end of autumn 2020 and foray into the Canadian market in 2021. By entering the US, they are looking towards taking advantage of an addressable market that has close to 50 million youth between the ages of 14 to 24. Relatively, Canada has approximately 5 million teenagers.
The startup is currently a team of around eight employees and launched as a fully remote company. They claimed that even before the COVID-19 pandemic, they did not wish to have physical office spaces. The startup’s small team, which the CEO expects to increase over the next number of months, is supported by the co-founder and former CEO of Frank And Oak, Ethan Song. Song is currently working as an Advisor for Wingocard, trying to establish strategic partnerships with brands that are looking to reach a teen market. Song recently left Frank And Oak, which is presently going through bankruptcy proceedings.
The CEO also stated that the startup will be seeking a seed extension round at the end of 2020 to guarantee that they have enough runway to get to a forthcoming Series A.
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