Invest in US Treasury Bills in minutes with the Finvest app

Image credits: Get Moving / Shivam Barkha, Co-founder and CEO of Get Moving, creator of the Finvest app

Apps like Robinhood have made it easier to invest in stocks, and Finvest wants to do the same with investing in U.S. Treasury bills.

Shivam Bharuka, co-founder and CEO of Get Moving, started working on Finvest in 2023. Baruka wanted to take advantage of the environment because interest rates were so high, but banks were giving pennies on the dollar, he told TechCrunch.

“Because of the high interest rates, you are basically free to make money from your unspent cash through Treasury bills. But there is no easy way to buy Treasury bills right now,” Barca said. Told. “You can buy through Treasury Direct, a government website dating back to the 1990s, or you can use traditional brokerages like Fidelity or Charles Schwab. These experiences are often opaque and difficult to use. It comes with a difficult user experience. Most modern fintech apps also don't allow you to invest in the underlying fixed income assets.”

He was part of the Winter 2023 Y Combinator cohort, initially joining a company focused on logistics for India. Eventually, he realized the problems with purchasing Treasury bills and changed his mind.

He and his team are developing Finvest, which makes buying, managing, and selling U.S. Treasury securities seamless. Pershing Advisor Solutions LLC, a subsidiary of Bank of New York Mellon Corporation, is acting as broker.

Features of Finvest's investment app. (Image credit: Get Moving)

Here's how it works: After downloading the iOS or Android app, users create an account, add a bank account and start making deposits. Usually, creating a brokerage account requires a one-day verification process. However, Finvest allows you to limit deposits, so you can start trading once your account is approved.

Finvest charges a flat management fee of 0.03% per month on the average daily market value of Treasury assets and a monthly management fee.

Bharuka is not alone in wanting to make this process easier. Zamp Finance is backed by Sequoia and provides a treasury management platform to improve access to U.S. Treasury bills. Finvest further enhances its offering with a high-yield cash management account that offers a 4.4% yield, higher than most savings accounts.

The company is in its early stages, and Barca declined to say how many customers have downloaded it, but said it has received about $1 million in deposits since launching in December.

The company has also already raised $2.7 million in funding from a group of investors including Bayhouse Capital, Unpopular Ventures, Y Combinator, Olive Tree Capital, Pioneer Fund, Fractal Ventures, and an angel investor group including former Airbnb executive Oliver Jung. has been acquired.

Bharuka plans to use the funding to expand Get Moving's engineering team and eventually add other asset classes such as corporate and municipal bonds to the Finvest app.

“We plan to launch this internationally as well,” he said. “We have been looking at this angle because there is a lot of interest in investing in government bonds, especially in Latin countries like Argentina and Brazil, where their economies are not as strong. We want to invest in the economy, but there is currently no direct way to do that.”