Good Money, a digital banking platform to be owned by its customers, featuring online and peer to peer banking services, announced today they have raised $30 million in Series A funding led by Galaxy Digital via its Galaxy EOS VC Fund. Investments also came from Breyer Capital, Blocktower Capital, Boost VC, Ken Howery, Blockchange Ventures, Cross Culture Ventures, Troy Carter, Mitch Kapor, Peter Diamandis, Blake Mycoskie, Justin Rosenstein, and others.
Good Money provides values-based banking services, these features include FDIC insured savings accounts that will generate a 2% yield, free ATMs nationally, and no overdraft fees.
Every customer will receive equity when they open an account and will become an owner of the banking platform. In an effort to democratize access to ownership and wealth creation, users may earn additional equity by installing the app, setting up a direct deposit or referring friends.
Additionally, Good Money users will direct 50% of the platform’s profits to impact projects focused on social and economic inequality, environmental stewardship and renewable energy. Good Money’s founding team has also pledged 50% of their equity to philanthropy and impact. How we bank is one of the most important decisions we can make, yet there is not currently a values-based, customer-owned bank in the US that has social and environmental activism woven into its business model.
“The combination of an activist brand with deep direct-to-consumer experience at scale, positions Good Money to be a leader in the historic disruption of the banking industry. We launched Galaxy’s EOS VC fund with our partners at Block.one in order to back exceptional founders who are capable of transforming consumer understanding and adoption of the blockchain. Good Money is led by world-class founders who have built billion dollar companies, with marketing experience and relationships that can bring tens-of-millions of users into the ecosystem quickly.”
The company is led by entrepreneur Gunnar Lovelace, who has spent his career building platforms at the intersection of business and social change. Lovelace was most recently Founder and co-CEO of Thrive Market ($180 million raised), a direct-to-consumer online grocery store that shook up the trillion dollar grocery market by building a business that offers organic groceries at the same price of conventional equivalents for the first time.
“We live in a world where consumers pay hundreds of dollars each year to banks for low-quality banking services, where banks return practically zero on deposits but leverage those deposits on a 10x ratio to finance projects that make the world a dirtier, less equitable place while creating no economic benefit for consumers. Modern banking is a primary driver of so many issues we face as a society — from economic inequality, institutional racism, environmental destruction to political corruption. We founded Good Money to help consumers take their money out of a system that’s both destroying the planet and extracting wealth from the most vulnerable and put it into a new system focused solely on benefiting people and planet. As we scale Good Money over the next 10 years, we will empower consumers to realize they should own the businesses they buy from as an evolutionary step in improving capitalism by leveling the economic playing field.”
Good Money is scheduled to launch a waitlist in January 2019 that will reward users with equity for securing their spot in anticipation of the full platform release later in the year.