Startup Spotlight #112: Alinea Invest
Alinea’s mission is to empower the next generation of investors.
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I got the chance to speak with Anam Lakhani, co-founder and co-CEO of Alinea Invest, about what she’s working on at her startup, and any advice she has for emerging entrepreneurs.
Alinea is a mobile investing app for the next generation. They match their users to stocks based on their interests and offer bite-sized insights so one can invest in the companies they believe in.
Lakhani is the co-founder and co-CEO of Alinea. Her own experiences coupled with those of her friends and classmates made her aware of the overwhelming feeling GenZs face when starting their investing journey. After graduating cum laude with a BA in Economics from Columbia University and working in investment banking at Citigroup, Lakhani is bringing investing to a demographic that is often overlooked and excluded by the financial industry.
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Startup Spotlight: Alinea Invest
Problem: In the past year, investing has become widely popular especially with young people, however, most are not making educated investment decisions. This investing culture has been created by existing platforms that have lacked the right education, community, and messaging for Gen-Zs.
Market: Today, the (TAM) purchasing power of college students in the United States is $593 billion, and when you look at college students’ daily spending power (SAM) in the United States - that number is $60 billion.
Solution: Alinea is a new experience to make investing personal, simple, and insightful. We do the homework, so our users can make informed decisions.
Team: Eve Halimi, co-founder and co-CEO, previously worked in strategy under the CEO at Contentsquare and has a BA in Economics from Columbia University. Nikhil Agrawal, co-founder and CTO, is a former software engineer at Credit Karma, a second-time founder, and has an MS in computer science from Northeastern University.
Recent Success:
Lahkani: Alinea has been successful in understanding and communicating with our community. Community is core to Alinea especially since when we struggled with investing, we turned to our friends and classmates for advice - it made investing less scary. Today, the Alinea community is present at 10 universities with over 60 community coordinators. We’re constantly in touch with our community to understand their fears and struggles when it comes to investing, and we strive to alleviate those pain points on the Alinea app.
Recent Struggle:
Lahkani: I’ve recently struggled with the shift in mindset from working in a corporate environment to being a startup founder. When you’re working a corporate job, the rules and structure are laid out for you, and being a startup founder is completely the opposite. Initially, it was strange to make schedules and processes for ourselves. Our team has been pretty great in creating structure and routine to hit our upcoming milestones - it really makes all the daunting tasks seem doable when you have a process in place.
Founder Advice:
Lahkani: Keep going and keep going bit by bit. Launching a product can seem like an overwhelming undertaking, however, if you set short-term goals for yourself, you truly start to see progress over time. Patience is also very essential to the process. Even if we want things to happen as soon as possible, they usually don’t and it’s important to keep that in mind. Lastly, take a day-by-day approach - you can’t solve all your problems at once!
Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:
Lahkani: Here are three founders you should check out next!
Lasse Kalkar, Founder of LiveFlow: LiveFlow is a fully automated, NextGen Spreadsheet, that lets you connect real-time data from your Google Sheets, banks, accounting, and revenue platforms (such as Quickbooks and Stripe) in a matter of minutes.
Kate Hiscox, Founder of Sivo: Sivo is debt as a service with an API that allows companies to risk score their users and lend them money at scale.
Adam Kearney, Founder of MaryElle: MaryElle connects cancer patients with expert oncology nurses from top cancer centers.
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