Pageonce Raises $15m in Personal Finance Space
Pageonce, a personal finance company which operates the Pageonce Money & Bills mobile service, announced it has raised $15 million in a fresh round of funding. The round was led by Morgenthaler Ventures, with participation from existing investors Pitango Ventures and Chairman of the Board Liron Petrushka. This brings the company’s total capital raised to $25 million, and reflects these investors’ interest in Pageonce’s offering, which has gained itself a pretty hefty userbase.
“The Pageonce ‘wallet’ is a natural mobile play and a great bet to be a financial services category leader,” said Rebecca Lynn, partner at Morgenthaler Ventures. “With over 4.5 million users, they have already demonstrated a knack for simplifying the complex task of managing money and bills for their users.”
Pageonce’s clear growth can be attributed to a number of factors, including the mobile aspect of its offerings, the very notable demand in the personal finance management space, and the simplicity Pageonce offers straight from the personal cloud. The company’s undergone a few changes in its app strategy, settling in the finance space. It’s an area where big data methods can be readily applied, and Pageonce has been swift to spread its access points across the mobile field, discussed here in an interview with Kristen Nicole.
One area of importance for Pageonce, as outlined in the interview, is the app’s ability to make recommendations beyond the basic personal finance tracking, helping consumers to make better decisions around their purchasing, saving and investment behavior. With this latest round of funding, Pageonce will be developing more action items around its apps, delivering even more decision-making tools for end users.
Pageonce founder and CEO Guy Goldstein discusses the mobile wallet space at large, and takes it as an opportunity to define his product in an emerging market. “It’s an initiative with so many things that can be on the phone, not just payments,” Goldstein starts. “[The smartphone] has become a device with all your information. It will probably take at least three years for this market to develop, but it’s going to happen. The way we differentiate ourselves is, we have something nobody has. We have the connection to everything financial for a user; not just the payment mechanism, but consumer information. What’s my balance, which bank account should I use to make certain payments, what’s my interest rate…it’s making consumers smart.”
Pageonce is gaining more and more momentum, but it’s only a part of a much bigger trend washing through the personal cloud. For one, Intuit recently released the iPad version of GoPayment, a payment processing app. With GoPayment installed on their iPads, business owners who do not hold a merchant account can process credit cards in a matter of seconds.
Location-based services are also one of the hottest topics going on in the personal cloud right now, and there have been one recent deal which stood out of the crowd. Local.com has acquired Krillion for $3.5 million. The latter is an operator of a location-based search engine which outputs search results – or in this case products – based on users’ locations.
