Profile / Fintech / Chicago
Brian Barnes
He looked at the tools he used to manage money at 25 and realized they were the same ones he used at 10. So he built new ones.
He looked at the tools he used to manage money at 25 and realized they were the same ones he used at 10. So he built new ones.
Brian Barnes runs M1, a Chicago company built on a quietly radical idea: most people make investing decisions rarely, but add money to their accounts constantly. If that is true, then the daily grind of buying, rebalancing, and routing cash should not need a human babysitter. M1 automates it. You set the targets once, the platform does the rest, and you keep the control most robo-advisors take away.
The product today stretches across investing, borrowing, and spending - what Barnes calls a finance super app. There are brokerage accounts and retirement accounts, margin loans, a credit card, high-yield cash, and the automated portfolios at the center of it all. The thread connecting them is the same instinct that got Barnes started: take something tedious and important, and make the machine handle the repetition.
His ambition is not subtle. Barnes has been open about wanting M1 to stand alongside the institutions he grew up reading about - a Charles Schwab, a JPMorgan, a Vanguard. Not a clever app that gets acquired, but a financial institution that outlives him.
We want to create a financial institution that lasts for decades, so we can survive in any macro environment.
The starting point is unusually specific. In fifth grade, Barnes's class got a mock-investing assignment - a pretend stock portfolio, the kind most kids forget by summer. His parents made it real. They opened an actual brokerage account in his name and told him he had to research a company before he could buy any of it. Real money, real homework, real consequences.
It stuck. He kept buying stocks through school, and the habit followed him to Stanford, where he studied economics. After graduating he spent time at an equity hedge fund and in management consulting. He loved the act of investing - the puzzle of figuring out what a business is worth. What he could not stand was the machinery around it.
By his mid-twenties he noticed something that bothered him. Consumer apps everywhere were getting dramatically better - messaging, maps, music, photos. The tools he used to manage his own money had barely moved since he was a child. The options were all bad: let cash rot in a low-yield account, pay a manager who wins whether you do or not, or wrestle with a clunky brokerage charging ten dollars a trade.
The financial services industry has lacked any meaningful innovation for far too long, and I decided it was time for change.
So in 2016 he raised early money, moved back to Chicago, and started building. M1 launched late that year. The first version was the kernel of everything since: a modern interface, portfolios you could customize or borrow from a template, and automation doing the work underneath.
M1 grew the way durable companies tend to - unevenly, then suddenly. Early rounds were measured in single-digit millions. By the time the platform hit its stride, M1 had raised more than $320 million across rounds running through a $150 million Series E, reaching a valuation around $1.5 billion and the unicorn label that comes with it.
The numbers underneath the funding are the ones Barnes cares about more. M1 has grown to billions in assets under management - past $12 billion by late 2025 - serving close to a million members. For a company that chose Chicago over the coasts and automation over advice, that is a real answer to a real skeptic's question.
Figures compiled from public reporting and M1 disclosures. Bars are relative, for illustration.
In 2021, at 31, Barnes made one of his more eye-catching moves: M1 acquired First National Bank of Buhl, a tiny bank in northern Minnesota. The point was not the bank's size - it was the federal charter and the infrastructure to push M1 deeper into banking. A small-town bank as a building block for a national finance super app.
Barnes is candid about the texture of running a company. In the early days, he describes living two lives in a single day - the executive in the morning, the analyst at night.
I played CEO from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. And then I played junior analyst from 11 a.m. to midnight every night.
He talks about emotional steadiness as a job requirement, not a personality trait. His line about the swings - the highs are high, the lows are low, and they are ten minutes apart - is the kind of thing founders nod at because it is exactly true. The leader's role, as he frames it, is to model the values he wants the whole company to share.
There is a family thread here worth naming. Barnes's mother, Brenda Barnes, was the CEO of Sara Lee and a senior executive at PepsiCo - one of the most prominent corporate leaders of her era. He has credited her as a mentor in how he thinks about leadership. The instinct to build something at institutional scale did not come from nowhere.
His first stock purchases happened in the fifth grade - with real money his parents put in a real account.
He raised early funding and then moved back to the Midwest to build, rather than staying on the coasts.
In 2021 M1 acquired a small Minnesota bank - the charter, not the branch, was the prize.
His mother led Sara Lee and was a top PepsiCo executive. He calls her a leadership mentor.
"I love the idea of investing, of trying to find out what a company's worth and how it's operating in a complex world."
"The highs are high, the lows are low, and they're ten minutes apart."
"The leader's job is to set an example for what you want the values across the company to be."
"The financial services industry has lacked any meaningful innovation for far too long."