Wellthi: An app for financial goals and those with similar interests

Editor’s note: At the start of the year, we look at which young companies have caught our eye for hitting a milestone, bringing in funding or growing its revenue base. This company has made our list of our Startups to Watch for 2023. See them all here.

With just $7,000 in her bank account, Fonta Gilliam launched Wellthi with the dream of digitizing a global tradition of informal lending circles that help people all over the world meet their financial goals.

Her vision: a community-based savings platform that partners with community banks. From 2015 to 2020, she spent her days grinding and cobbling together dollars from accelerators, small investors and the D.C. government to fund her business. In 2020, she started gaining traction through D.C. partnerships that connected businesses with local lenders to raise a total $1.2 million in a three-month period.

Simply put, her platform works with users’ banking apps to allow them to set financial goals with friends and family members, but also find groups of people with similar interests working toward the same goals. Gilliam likens her app, which has yet to formally launch, to the TikTok of wealth management — banks use the social feeds of app users and customer referrals to sign more up, rather than spending on extensive marketing campaigns or algorithms.

Wellthi has seen a pivot or two already. It rebranded from Invest Sou Sou because the former name was similar to a chain-mail solicitation pyramid scheme that had taken hold in Black communities during the peak of the pandemic in 2020. The scams would go by the name “sou-sou,” “blessing loom” or “gifting circle” and started to have an impact on the brand Gilliam had spent years working with banks to build.

Last fall, the startup raised $2.1 million in an oversubscribed seed round with plans to take on up to $3 million in strategic capital this first quarter. Gilliam hopes to spend this year linking arms with more large regional banks in hopes of reaching another 5 million customers. Thus far, she’s signed up with eight banks, with credit card giants Visa and MasterCard in the pipeline.

She expects to double her current 15 employees by year’s end, bringing on software engineers and sales experts. “There’s definitely a desire for growth,” Gilliam said. “But I’ve got to balance that with staying lean as a fintech that has been largely undercapitalized up until [this] date. And coming into a recession, I’ve got to be smart about how we use these funds.”

The ultimate goal, she said, is for Wellthi to set up a facility in Anacostia, where she lives, to offer job opportunities for Black and brown residents there. “I’d really love to set up some type of customer support or data center there,” she said. “That’s kind of in my vision and would love to do that when we hit our Series A.”

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