Apps like Robinhood made it easy to invest in stocks and Fininvest wants to do the same with investing in US Treasury bills.
Shivam Bharuka, co-founder and CEO of Get Moving, started working at Finvest in 2023. With interest rates at such high levels, Bharuka wanted to take advantage of the environment, however, banks were giving pennies on the dollar, he told TechCrunch.
“With high interest rates, you are basically making free money on idle cash through U.S. Treasury bills. But today there is no easy way to buy Treasury bills,” Bharuka said. “You can buy them through the government website, Treasury Direct, which is a 1990s experience, or use legacy brokers like Fidelity or Charles Schwab. Those experiences are often opaque and lead to a clunky user experience. Most modern fintech applications also do not allow investing in underlying fixed income assets.”
Was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2023 cohort; However, Bharuka initially worked at a company focused on logistics for India. He ended up making a turn when he noticed the weaknesses associated with purchasing Treasury Bills.
He and his team are developing Finvest to make buying, managing and selling US Treasury bills seamless. Pershing Advisor Solutions LLC, a subsidiary of Bank of New York Mellon Corp., acts as a brokerage firm.
Features of the Finvest investment app. (Image credit: Get Moving)
Here's how it works: After downloading the iOS or Android app, users create an account, add a bank account, and initiate a deposit. Typically, there is a one-day verification process to create a brokerage account. However, Finvest allows the deposit to be activated so that once the account is approved, the transaction begins to take place.
Finvest charges a fixed management fee of 0.03% per month on the average daily market value of its Treasury assets and monthly management fees.
Bharuka is not the only one who wants to make this process easier. Zamp Finance, backed by Sequoia, provides a treasury management platform for better access to US Treasury bills. Finvest enhances its offering with a high-yield cash management account that gives you a 4. 4%, higher than most savings accounts.
The company is in its early stages, and Bharuka declined to say how many customers have downloaded, but he did say about $1 million in deposits have been made since launching in December.
It has also already secured $2.7 million in funding from a group of investors that includes Bayhouse Capital, Unpopular Ventures, Y Combinator, Olive Tree Capital, Pioneer Fund, Fractal Ventures and a group of angel investors, including the former Airbnb executive Oliver Jung.
Bharuka plans to use the funds to expand Get Moving's engineering team and eventually add other asset classes to the Finvest app, for example, corporate bonds and municipal bonds.
“We are also planning to launch this internationally,” he said. “We have been exploring this angle because there is a lot of interest in investing in Treasury bonds, especially in Latin countries, like Argentina or Brazil, because their economic economies have not been as strong. “They want to invest in a stronger economy, but today there is no direct way to do it.”
