What do you get if you cross the design of TikTok with the playlists of Spotify and the financial focus of Robinhood?
The answer is an app that raised $2.1 million in seed funding last year and is now home to a devoted community of thousands of users. It’s called Alinea, and its Gen Z founders want it to be the next big thing in personal finance.
Alinea (which has no relation to the Michelin-starred restaurant of the same name) is the brainchild of Anam Lakhani and Eve Halimi, who met in an econ class at Columbia University. Their goal is to simplify investing by grouping stock portfolios into collections called “playlists.” Alinea employs a personality quiz to help users develop their own playlists, and its also possible to access playlists created by other people and invest in them yourself. If strategies like “WW III hedge” and “Just Buy This Trust Me” catch your attention, you can put your money where your eyes are.
Subscribe for daily Tubefilter Top Stories
Like on a traditional social media app, Alinea users have their own public profiles, and “Stories” provide users with business news updates. Co-founders Lakhani and Halimi, who are just 25 years old, understand the ways in which a familiar interface can help a new user become comfortable with a complex topic like finance. “Design was such a vital part of this,” Lakhani told Business Insider. She wants newcomers to think, “this feels familiar. I’ve seen something like this before. I can approach this. This doesn’t feel technical or scary, [and] I don’t have to be an expert.”
As you might expect, Alinea is cultivating its own presence on TikTok. The app’s founders post short videos in which they discuss the story of their company and deliver financial advice to followers.
@alineainvest How we turned our college idea into a venture backed start-up 💜🎉 #fyp #startup #stocks #investing #fintech ♬ SUN GOES DOWN – Andreas Roehrig
And then there’s crypto, which may just be Alinea’s secret weapon. On its homepage, in a section titled “let’s be transparent,” the app advertises its low transaction fees. Buying $100 of Bitcoin on Alinea has a fee of just $1, far lower than equivalent rates on Coinbase.
If your interest is sufficiently piqued, you can find Alinea on the App Store.
