Philadelphia financial services startup selected for AWS Accelerator for Female Founders

Walkthrough, a Philadelphia-based startup seeking to "serve every American that needs financial advice but can't afford it," is one of 25 companies receiving $250,000 from the Amazon Web Services Impact Accelerator for Women Founders.

Walkthrough was founded by former Yale classmates Megan Valentine, Ben Bartolome and Eric Anderson in August 2021. The startup was chosen from a pool of more than 1,000 applicants, with Valentine participating in the two-month accelerator program beginning this week at AWS headquarters in Seattle.

Co-CEOs Valentine and Bartolome both came from large companies to launch the small startup. Valentine worked at Google as a software engineer and Bartolome as a data analyst at Navy Federal Credit Union. They left those jobs to design Walkthrough, a financial planning app designed to give personalized, affordable financial advice tailored to people who may be new to the investing world. The app is expected to roll out over the next year.

Walkthrough uses behavioral science and gamification to keep users engaged and motivated to invest and plan for the future. The cost for users is $10 per month, which Valentine said is a stark contrast to traditional financial advisors that charge 1% of a person's total assets or thousands of dollars per year. The company also offers a "comprehensive, end-to-end" financial plan for $100, which they estimate is 25 times less than the traditional cost, which can be a few thousand dollars.

Valentine said the trio of cofounders want to "bootstrap for as long as we can" but acknowledged that the infusion of cash from the Amazon accelerator "makes the pressure to fundraise lighter." Walkthrough will use the money from the accelerator to pay SEC compliance lawyers and experiment with go-to-market strategies. Valentine said that a seed round and public launch should come next year.

"[In 2023], we're hoping to have something like 10,000 folks using our app and paying for it and will at that point definitely be starting to raise so we can grow more and have a bigger impact," Valentine said.

Walkthrough's first cohort of about 130 app users is a group of first-generation, low-income recent college grads — an indicator of who the app is marketed toward. The company said that 50% of those users heeded the financial advice given on the app and took action like opening a Roth IRA.

After five years at Google, Valentine said she had seen big projects she was working on get canceled and some not see the light of day. She wanted to build something of her own from the ground up.

"There was just this sense of wanting to work on something that I cared about deeply and owned, so that it could sort of fail or succeed on its own accord," Valentine said. "It just felt like I wanted to put my work into the world and really try to help people."

Neither Valentine nor Bartolome originally hail from the Philadelphia area — Valentine is from Colorado and Bartolome from Greater New Orleans — but the opportunity for their app to have an impact in their new home isn't lost on them.

"We're a company that's committed to financial inclusion and helping folks be financially stable over time and understanding that that is a particular need for Philadelphia as a city," said Bartolome, who moved here when his wife got a job with the Philadelphia Orchestra. "It's really good to be located there because we're working to solve a problem that the city could readily use."

Bartolome added that the higher education landscape in Philadelphia makes it an ideal place for a startup, and Valentine said that "it's very refreshing to be out of the Silicon Valley bubble in some ways, like we're trying to solve real problems."