When serial entrepreneurs Felix W. Ortiz III and Ryan Wuerch decided to start raising venture funding for their fintech startup, they wanted to take a new approach by specifically seeking investment firms that have diverse founders and boards.
"We wanted to make sure that the investors mentally understood the demographic that we're going after," Ortiz said.
Specifically, their new startup, Onuu, is aimed at personalizing banking and life insurance services for "modest Americans," he added.
It's a membership-based business model that uses AI to personalize offerings for specific life scenarios, including credit-building, financial literacy content, life insurance and a credit card that allows users to start with $500 and scale up as they build their wealth.
Onuu's initial $6 million funding round, announced March 16, came from Leap Global Partners, with participation from Ulu Ventures, SV LATAM Capital, Jumpstarter Ventures, Verso Capital and Capital Factory Ventures. Ortiz said he and Wuerch worked with those investors, in part, because they have diverse partners or boards or are known to work with diverse founders.
He speaks from his experience as a founder who initially didn't have the typical credentials VCs are known to look for. He's a Brooklyn native who grew up in an apartment with eight family members, including his grandmother who came from Puerto Rico and didn't know English well. He was a paratrooper before he started getting into tech and startups.
"I didn't come from Stanford. I didn't go to an Ivy League school," he said. "I had to figure out how to break in, in a different way. And the way I broke in, to be candid, is because my military background gave me the credibility to break in, because VCs like to hang out with paratroopers."
Meanwhile, it was the experiences Ortiz saw his grandmother go through that inspired him to start Onuu with the goal of ensuring low- and middle-income people can build wealth and help their families improve their financial standing generation after generation. While the startup does business as Onuu, its legal name, Candi Holdings, Inc., is a nod to his grandma, Candi. Onuu's AI-powered digital guide, which provides financial literacy content, is also named Candi.
"My grandma was basically, to be candid, living off food stamps, and she was housing my parents and I, and my aunt and uncle, because they came from Puerto Rico too, while all the adults were going to school, and my brothers and I were like, one or two years old," he said.
Ortiz said his grandma died at a young age and didn't have much financial liquidity to pass on, and there weren't financial products available to someone in her situation.
Ortiz got his start in tech when he attended a boot camp for transitioning veterans that was put on by Goldman Sachs and Techstars. With help from CEOs he met there, he went on to found Virdis Learning in 2009 and Empath in 2020.
Wuerch, Onuu's other co-founder, meanwhile was a founder at Motricity, which went public in 2010, before founding Solavei, which was acquired by Aspider, and Austin-based fintech startup Dosh, which was acquired last year by Cardlytics Inc. in a $275 million cash and stock deal.
Onuu currently has 23 employees, about half of whom work in engineering-related roles. They're building out marketing and operations teams, with plans to hire 15-20 people in the next couple quarters. The company operates remotely, but it plans to open an office in downtown Austin or East Austin later this year.
The company is launching its products and membership in Texas first before expanding nationwide, Ortiz said.
Ortiz, who came to Texas in 2017, is an AI and machine learning enthusiast, and Austin's startup community is packed with technologists focused on developing AI.
"Austin, to me, seems to be the perfect storm," he said. "I knew that I had come in on the earlier side, because it was four and a half years ago, but I knew at the same time that the ecosystem here was evolving. As I thought about what company I waned to do next that it would be the perfect launchpad to create a unicorn, and beyond, because Austin has the ecosystem to enable that."
