Entrepreneur Secures $2M For App Helping Immigrants Save Money

Entrepreneur Nina Mohanty raised $2 million for Bloom Money, an app designed to help immigrant communities save money. The app, which was founded in 2021, allows immigrants based in the UK to save money collectively, a practice also known as “money circles.”

Helping immigrants save money

Mohanty worked with banks like Starling Bank, Klarna, and Mastercard and realized they don’t really understand how immigrant communities manage their money. “At a certain point, I just realized I got very frustrated wondering who was building for immigrant communities because I was building the same product for the same person all the time,” she told CNBC Make It.

Immigrants don’t tend to take out loans from banks; they depend on community and collaboration instead. When Mohanty spoke to different immigrants, she encountered a similar pool system.

In this system, a group of people agree to pay $100 monthly into a savings pot, bringing the total to $300. In the first month, one person gets access to the whole $300; the next month, another person gets access to the fund, and the cycle continues.

“It’s academically called a roster or a rotating savings and credit association [ROSCA], but it’s very community-led. It’s very socially led,” said.

Building generational wealth for immigrants

Outside of digitalizing the rotation of savings, Bloom hopes to build investment products as immigrants tend to focus on sending money home, which reduces the possibility of creating wealth for future generations.

“They’re not necessarily planning for their future or their next generation so imagine if our parents hadn’t saved or hadn’t put money into their pension pots or investment clubs and so we want to now make it so that people can build their wealth,” Mohanty said.

Bloom is currently building users’ credit profiles to lend money to them to help them invest in their pension pots or gold.

Image: Nina Mohanty