He couldn't find a money app he actually wanted to open. So he quit Google and built one - by hand, in Swift, for seven people.
Andrés Ugarte runs Copilot Money the way most founders only claim to: he still writes the code. The company is profitable, past 100,000 paying subscribers, and backed by a $6M Series A. And yet the person setting the strategy is the same person who shipped weekly features over email back when the entire user base could fit around a dinner table.
Copilot is a personal finance app for iOS, web, and Android. It connects your accounts, watches your spending, and uses machine learning to sort every transaction into the right bucket. The twist is where that machine learning runs: on your device, not in a server farm. No ads. No data resale. A subscription, and nothing else for sale.
That design wasn't a marketing decision. It came from the people who showed up first. When Copilot was tiny, early users wrote to Ugarte with a single request - please don't sell my data or put in ads. He built the business model around that sentence and never looked back.
Today Copilot sits in a category Intuit's Mint defined and then abandoned. When Mint went dark, millions of people needed somewhere to land. A lot of them landed here.
Users can tell if you're doing something with passion.- Andrés Ugarte
In 2018, Ugarte was a senior software engineer with a resume people would frame: Google's Area 120, where he led Material Design tooling for iOS and Mac, and YouTube, where he shipped YouTube Gaming for iOS. Before that, Groupon. Before that, a kid in Santiago who studied computer science and engineering at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and spent a semester at Berkeley.
He kept hunting for the perfect app to manage his money. "I lost count of how many I tried," he says. None of them stuck. So he quit, and for the first six months he built alone. Eventually he pulled in Gabriel, a friend from engineering school.
Copilot took roughly 18 months to reach the public. When it finally launched in January 2020, it had seven users. Ugarte treated them like a newsroom treats its first subscribers - he emailed them new features every week and watched what they did with them.
He chose native Swift on purpose. The bet was that quality is felt before it's understood, and that a money app you actually enjoy opening is worth building the slow way.
Ugarte argues engineers and designers have "a superpower when it comes to understanding what goes into crafting a product." So the CEO stays technical.
Transaction categorization runs locally, not in the cloud. The subscription is the business model - your data isn't.
Built in Swift to maximize feel and quality, betting that people return to apps made with care.
Launched with seven users and weekly email updates. Reached profitability in 2023.
When it launched, Mint was groundbreaking, but the app ended up being asleep at the wheel.- Andrés Ugarte, on the giant his app outlasted
For years, Mint was the default. Free, ad-supported, owned by Intuit, used by millions. Then, in November 2023, Intuit announced it was shutting Mint down. Overnight, a category lost its anchor and millions of people went looking for a new home.
That announcement day became Copilot's biggest day ever - signups ran 5x a normal day. The competitors, Ugarte noted, "seemed like Mint, but with a fresh coat of paint." Copilot wasn't. In the four months that followed, the company grew more than it had in its entire previous four years.
The growth had receipts. Copilot turned the moment into a $6M Series A led by Nico Wittenborn's Adjacent - the firm behind Revolut, Calm, and BeReal - bringing total funding to around $10.5M. The cap table reads like a founder's group chat: Scott Belsky, Immad Akhund, Mathilde Collin, Jeff Weinstein, Lenny Rachitsky.
Then Copilot did the obvious thing it had resisted for years: it left iOS-only behind and shipped web and Android, so the Mint refugees on every platform had somewhere to go.
That's good for an app that is not a social network.
They seemed like Mint, but with a fresh coat of paint.
B.S. and Professional Degree in Computer Science & Engineering, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. A semester at UC Berkeley in 2010.
Engineering roles including Groupon, then Google's Area 120 - leading Material Design tooling for iOS and Mac.
At YouTube, ships YouTube Gaming for iOS.
Quits Google to build Copilot. Six months solo, then partners with his engineering-school friend Gabriel.
Copilot launches publicly with seven users and weekly feature emails.
Copilot reaches profitability. Mint's shutdown sends signups soaring.
Closes a $6M Series A led by Adjacent. Launches Web and Android. Featured by The New York Times.
Ugarte's goal hasn't moved since 2018: a money app that respects your privacy, feels good enough to open every day, and helps you actually understand your financial life - without ads, without selling your data, and now on every device you own.