GOHENRY

Louise Hill and Dean Brauer founded GoHenry in 2012 in the UK. Hill had spent years in financial services and noticed a gap: children in the digital economy had no real way to manage their own money.

Cash pocket money was disappearing as a concept. Kids were watching their parents tap cards and phones to pay for things.

GoHenry's answer was a prepaid Visa debit card linked to a parent-controlled app. Parents could set a weekly allowance, assign chores that unlock extra money, set spending limits by category, and get real-time notifications when the card was used.

Kids got a real card, real money, and real decisions — but with guardrails. The product launched in the UK, expanded to the United States in 2018, and in March 2022 merged with Pixpay, a similar French startup, to create a European powerhouse in the youth financial services space.

GoHenry charges parents a monthly subscription fee — around $4.99 per child in the US. This is simple and clean: no transaction fees, no upsells on junk.

The product is the subscription. Parents pay for the management tools and the card, children get financial education built into the experience.

The app includes interactive financial literacy lessons and quizzes alongside the spending and saving features. GoHenry makes money predictably as long as families stay subscribed, and since the product grows with the child, churn tends to be driven by age-out rather than dissatisfaction.

GoHenry Prepaid Visa — the core product. A physical and virtual prepaid Visa card for children aged 6-18.

Parents top it up, set weekly allowances, and control spending categories. Children can use it anywhere Visa is accepted.

Parental Controls App — the iOS and Android app that parents use to manage the card, set tasks and chores, review spending, and top up the account instantly. Financial Education Content — built directly into the child-facing app.

Interactive lessons on saving, spending, earning, and giving, tied to the child's real account activity. Personalised card designs — a small feature that turned out to matter a lot.

Children can customise their card with their own photo or a design, which increases emotional attachment to the product.

GoHenry grew in the UK through parent word-of-mouth and school partnerships. Financial education is on the curriculum in UK schools, which created natural institutional touchpoints.

The US expansion in 2018 required adapting to a different regulatory environment and a more competitive market — there were already several kids' banking apps in the US — but GoHenry had a more polished product and a cleaner business model than most. The Pixpay merger in 2022 was a consolidation play, combining two similar businesses to create a larger, more defensible European entity.

The Acorns acquisition in 2023 gave GoHenry access to Acorns' 9 million US subscribers and its product and distribution infrastructure.

Kids' fintech is a crowded space. Greenlight, Current, Step, BusyKid, and several others are competing for the same parent-and-child relationship.

Most of these products are quite similar — card, app, parental controls — which means differentiation requires either better execution, better branding, or lower price. GoHenry consistently competed on product quality and financial education depth, but margin compression is real when there are five apps doing roughly the same thing for roughly the same price.

The acquisition by Acorns acknowledges this reality: the standalone path was getting harder.

GoHenry raised from a mix of institutional and strategic investors. Edison Partners, a US growth equity firm that focuses on fintech and technology companies, led the Series C in 2019 — a significant milestone that funded US expansion.

Revaia (formerly Gaia Capital Partners), a European growth investor, also participated. Earlier rounds included backing from Citi Ventures, the venture arm of Citigroup, which provided both capital and strategic relevance given Citi's position in consumer banking.

The company raised approximately $46.4 million in total before the Acorns acquisition in April 2023.