WEALTHSIMPLE

The origin is almost too on-brand. Katchen built a simple spreadsheet to help his old startup coworkers invest a windfall after their company got acquired.

They kept coming back for more help. So in 2014 he turned that spreadsheet into a company with Brett Huneycutt and Rudy Adler.

The pitch was dead simple. Most people find investing confusing and scary.

Wealthsimple would just do it for them, with low fees and no jargon. The first seed round was about 2 million dollars from Toronto angels.

Wealthsimple makes money a few ways. It charges a small yearly fee on the money it manages, roughly 0.4 to 0.5 percent.

It earns a spread on crypto trades. It takes a cut on currency conversion and charges for premium account tiers.

The stock trading app is free to use, which pulls people in the door. Then it nudges them into managed portfolios, a high-interest cash account, and paid plans.

The whole idea is to be the one money app a Canadian actually needs.

The core is Wealthsimple Invest, the automated portfolios that started it all. Wealthsimple Trade lets people buy stocks and ETFs with no commission.

Wealthsimple Crypto handles digital coins. There is a cash account with a high interest rate that acts like a bank.

And Wealthsimple Tax, formerly SimpleTax, lets Canadians file taxes for free or a small tip. The strategy is to keep you inside one app for everything money.

The smartest move was chasing young Canadians nobody else wanted. Big banks treated small accounts as a nuisance.

Wealthsimple welcomed them with zero minimums and a clean app. Then it added free stock trading in 2019 and crypto in 2020, right as retail investing exploded.

It also nailed marketing that did not feel like a bank. Free tax software through Wealthsimple Tax pulled in millions of users once a year.

Each product quietly fed the next.

Wealthsimple lives or dies on the Canadian market, which is small. Only about 40 million people live there.

To keep growing it has to sell more products to the same customers. It tried expanding into the US and UK and pulled back from both.

Competing with the giant Canadian banks is brutal. Those banks have branches, mortgages, and decades of trust.

Wealthsimple also rode the 2021 trading boom, and when markets cooled the easy growth got a lot harder.

The backer that matters most is Power Corporation of Canada, an old-money financial giant. Its Power Financial arm led the early rounds, putting in around 74 million dollars and taking a controlling stake.

Later rounds brought in a who is who of growth investors. Meritech and Greylock led the huge 2021 raise.

Others included DST Global, Iconiq, Dragoneer, TCV, and Allianz X. Having Power Corporation behind it gave a young fintech instant credibility with cautious Canadians.