Why We Raised $2.4 Million

Stoovo, smart banking for gig workers that leverages A.I. to stabilize and optimize income.

We’re proud to announce to our gig workers that we’ve successfully raised $2.4 million in seed funding. This round will ensure that our vision of empowering gig workers through the power of technology is now more than just a dream as we target our Series A funding at the end of 2021.

The gig economy is an emerging workforce in pursuit of stability; it has become a microcosm of a future workforce — brought into focus by the pandemic (Cake & Arrow)

The average gig worker spends over six hours per week looking for gigs on multiple apps. Most gig workers experience income volatility that keeps them from building emergency savings — many struggle just to pay bills.

Stoovo would not have been possible without our angel and early-stage investors who helped complete this seed round. Our lead investor, Los Angeles-based Watertower Ventures, is driven by ‘finding things that matter.’ We are grateful to have found another partner that groks the Stoovo mission and look forward to continuing this journey with all of our investors.

Stoovo understands the challenges gig workers face every day and our investors fully understand Stoovo’s key premise: How can you save more when you don’t earn enough in the first place⁉️

Stoovo helps gig workers make more money and not just takes their hard-earned money. We ensure that gig workers always have cash on hand so they can keep earning while providing insights so that workers reach their goals. Our technology reduces income volatility, manages taxes, and allows them to plan for their lives like a W-2 employee.

We knew what we wanted to be, but more importantly, what we didn’t want to be.

As technology is advancing, jobs are rapidly digitalizing and transforming. Thanks to developments in mobile technologies companies leverage all these advancements to optimize their workforce. To be able to keep up and adapt, gig workers must be able to process large amount of information available to them and make the best decisions for themselves. However, unlike companies, gig workers have little time and techniques to do so.

We created Stoovo to make a difference in their lives. We’ve built A.I. models from hundreds of data-points to help our users make the best decision to maximize their income — an impossible task for mere humans.

Stoovo founder and CEO Hantz Févry did rideshare and delivery gigs during his lunch hour while working full time at Google and while building Stoovo in his off-hours.

We did not want to be another neobank that offered payday advances on a Stoovo card but also risked getting gig workers into more debt — so we created a system that provides emergency capital based on the user’s earnings history and helps them increase their earnings to reach their goal and pay back loans.

We didn’t want to perpetuate the cycle of living from paycheck to paycheck. We knew that to make a difference, gig workers needed an app that helped reduce income volatility and allows them to pay their bills on time and build savings through our AI-driven optimization.

We did not want to be an app that found gigs but didn’t help users more effectively manage their money and their taxes. The Stoovo app guides users like a trusted coach to help them achieve goals, pay their bills, and regularly save a set amount of money.

Our app estimates the amounts needed for quarterly taxes, alerts our users to critical payment dates, and automatically files all of the required IRS forms on behalf of the user.

Stoovo’s early adopters averaged a 32 percent increase in hourly earnings while using the Stoovo app.

While building Stoovo, we saw scores of new gig apps released that loaned money to gig workers but did not increase actual earnings. As real data continued to pour in, both me and our co-founders, Semih Korkmaz and Pierre Mombeleur, realized that our AI was working as we saw both user earnings and user retention increase.

This seed round will give us the resources to scale and expand and allow us to serve our gig workers better than ever. We want to thank our early users for trusting us with their livelihoods and for providing critical feedback that allowed us to continually improve and expand the Stoovo app. We’ll always have your back.