French startup Yomoni is a promising fintech startup operating robo-advisors. It means that you can give the company some of your savings, and the startup automatically manages a portfolio for you, buying and selling stocks, bonds and more. Yomoni just raised $5.4 million from existing investors Crédit Mutuel Arkéa and Iéna Venture (€5 million).
The management team is also buying back some of the shares and keeping a good chunk of the company.
If you’re not familiar with robo-advisors, think about Yomoni as a sort of Wealthfront or Betterment for the French market. While those American companies are getting quite big, robo-advisors are somewhat new in France.
In addition to hiring more people, today’s funding round will lead to new features. For instance, the company says that there will be a new product specifically targeted toward parents who want to save money for their children. Yomoni also hints at a potential mobile app.
When you start investing with Yomoni, you can choose if you want a safe investment or a risky one. Your portolio’s performance will vary depending on this profile — and there’s a risk that you’ll lose money. But Yomoni has done a good job so far. Portfolios were up between 2.3 percent and 7.1 percent in 2016.
The startup plans to make money on fees — around 1.6 percent per year. The performance indicators I gave you in the previous paragraph are net of fees.
So far, the company has 2,000 clients, representing $12.9 million under management (€12 million, or €6,000 per client on average). But this trend is accelerating — in 2020, Yomoni wants to manage $1.08 billion (€1 billion). The startup could be thinking about a European expansion to reach this goal.
