Enriched Couples has been selected to participate in an Indianapolis accelerator program just weeks before the launch of its platform.
The New Albany, Indiana-based software-as-a-service company has joined gener8tor's gBETA cohort in Indianapolis, alongside four other companies. Annette Miller, CEO and co-founder of Enriched Couples, told me the seven-week accelerator from gener8tor, which has offices in Milwaukee and Madison, is coinciding with the launch of its platform later this spring.
Enriched Couples, founded in 2015, was born out of Miller's master thesis while studying counseling psychology at University of Louisville. It grew into a vision for helping families of all kinds have a better relationship with their finances and with each other.
"In grad school, we talked about how you can make an impact in people's lives at different points of intervention; it can be the kids, it can be the parents, it could be older adults influencing grandparents," Miller said. "We see the couple as the heart of the family and so we're excited about helping young couples just as they are starting to build their lives together."
The Vogt Award-winning startup aims to help couples measure, grow and track healthy relationship habits with unified financial decision-making through its scientifically-developed platform that uses a psychology-based methodology.
Miller said since Enriched Couples co-founder Michael May moved to Louisville from Chicago in the fall of 2019, they have moved on from developing their methodology to building the product itself.
The resulting product has three main parts: assessing how users feel about their relationship and financial health; experiential learning and communication; and ongoing goal tracking and habit management.
Unlike other money-managing platforms such as Mint.com or Zeta, Miller explained Enriched Couples is a behavioral and relationship management platform with a goal of impacting people beyond balancing budgets.
"We often liken ourselves to Noom, the weight loss app ... we're like the Noom for healthy relationship and financial habits, as opposed to weight loss," she said. "They also use a cognitive, behavioral therapy approach in their app and ours is based on the same sorts of things."
Miller said they will use gener8tor's equity-free accelerator program in Indianapolis to stratify the company's goals not just for this year, but a roadmap from product launch this spring to its first Series A fund raising round.
While Enriched Couples' initial market of young couples is huge — 15 million couples equating to a $2.1 billion market — Miller added there's an even bigger long-term growth opportunity by integrating transaction data. After getting users, the company can then use predictive analytics to actually prevent relationship problems.
Enriched Couple's application is in beta testing (you can sign up to use it here), and Miller said it is expected to launch fully in the second quarter of 2021.
