US fintechs Albert and Crux Informatics in funding rounds

Written by Tanya Andreasyan
2nd February 2021

A pair of US fintechs have raised a total of $130 million, featuring Albert’s $100 million Series C funding round and Crux Informatics’ $36 million convertible note.

California-based Albert, which is “on a mission to help millions of Americans achieve financial wellness”, raised $100 million in the Series C funding round. The round was led by General Atlantic with participation from CapitalG (Alphabet’s independent growth fund), Portag3, and QED.

This brings Albert’s total funding to $173 million.

Since its launch in 2016, the company says more than five million people have used its services and have saved over $500 million.

“At Albert, we do something no one else does: we deliver personalised financial advice from our team of human finance experts – aka our geniuses – at a radically affordable price. This guidance can be put into action automatically, using software we built from scratch,” it sates.

“Until now, financial apps have been focused on creating budgeting and monitoring tools, but they stopped short of helping customers take action to better their financial health. We built a beautifully designed, simple product to improve the financial lives of millions of people. Streamline your savings, invest with professional guidance, and get advice on-demand.”

Albert’s savings products are insured through its partner banks, Wells Fargo and Axos Bank. Its app facilitates banking services through Sutton Bank, and its Mastercard debit card is also issued by Sutton Bank.

Apex Clearing Corporation provides clearing, execution and custody services for the advisory assets of Albert Investments clients. Products offered by Albert Investments are not FDIC insured.

A New York-based data engineering company, Crux Informatics, closed a $36 million convertible note with its existing investors.

Crux says its cloud-based technology stack and managed services enables organisations to reliably get the data they need, how they need it and where they need it.

Its clients include hedge funds, asset managers, sovereign wealth funds, commodity trading advisors, banks, fund administrators, exchanges, large and small traditional and alternative data vendors, cloud data warehouse providers, and analytics platforms.

Crux was founded in 2017 by fintech veteran Philip Brittan (CEO). Its backers include Citi, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Two Sigma. It employs 60+ people and has raised $45 million in funding to date. It previously raised $20 million in autumn 2018.

“2020 was a milestone year for Crux, launching three products, doubling the number of data supplier partnerships and increasing by tenfold both the number of datasets delivered and the number of clients served on our platform,” says Brittan.

“Today, Crux delivers over 14,000 datasets on an ongoing basis and has more than 700 million data files under management. With this financing, the company plans to significantly grow this amount to deliver any dataset from any data supplier to any data consumer via its platform.”

The company will launch two new products in 2021: Crux Protect – an integrated data quality service, and Crux Wrangle – data engineering as a service.