Leadership and transitions have been smooth post SPAC merger and Acorns currently employs 260 people. Walter Cruttenden, Acorns co-founder, served as its first CEO and Jeffery Cruttenden served as COO. In 2014, the smartphone app was launched and in eight months, Acorns was on its third round of financing. With initial funding from their family investment firm, Cruttenden Partners, and two years working with regulators, Walter and Jeffery chose to retain the broker-dealer platform. At first, Walter and Jeffery wanted to develop and sell their micro-investing platform to a traditional brokerage firm as “the starter account, the farm school, the incubator” that would make users become more familiar with investing and participating more widely in the stock market. Acorns claims only 1% of Americans that need financial help have access to it and that over 70% don’t have over $1,000 in savings. Therefore, the father and son team wanted to teach financial literacy, streamline the process to save and invest, and more ambitiously – close the wealth gap. Also, according to Walter Cruttenden, the most significant barrier potential small investors face is that they may be overwhelmed by the choices, e.g. The father and son team realized that the traditional, commission-based brokerage firms were not serving a large swath of the population who find it difficult to get enough money together to get started, or for whom commissions based brokerage firms make it hard for them to invest small amounts. Jeffrey Cruttenden, then a mathematics major at Lewis and Clark University, conceived of Acorns after noticing that even among his smart and savvy friends, none had investment accounts. At their last round of funding in December 2019, the private company did not share their valuation.Īcorns, legal name is Acorns Grow LLC, was founded in 2012 by Walter and Jeffery Cruttenden because they wanted to streamline the investment process for the average American consumer.
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