Carlo Kobe

A credit line dressed as a debit card - and the kid who thought of it.

Carlo Kobe runs Mine, the company most people still know as Fizz. It sells a card that behaves like a debit card - it can't spend past the money in your checking account - while quietly reporting to the credit bureaus like a credit card. No interest. No overspending. No slow slide into debt. For a generation that watched credit cards eat their older siblings alive, that combination is the entire pitch.

The company sits in Soho, employs a small team, and has grown to roughly a million users, about 70% of them under 30. It crossed $10 million in annual recurring revenue and, in January 2026, retired the Fizz name for Mine and raised a $14 million Series A led by 359 Capital, with Kleiner Perkins - an early believer - coming back for more.

Bolted onto the card is MoneyGPT, an AI money assistant that reads your linked accounts and answers the questions nobody teaches you in school. It's a neat bit of symmetry: before he was a fintech founder, Kobe worked in AI at a Berlin research lab. The two threads finally met.

The rejection in Harvard Square

Kobe is a German immigrant. He came to Harvard in 2019 to study statistics and economics, and somewhere in his first stretch on campus he tried to do the most ordinary American thing - open a credit card. He couldn't. His parents were in Germany and couldn't co-sign. The application bounced. Then it bounced again. And again.

That's a small humiliation most people file away and forget. Kobe treated it as a market. He'd been trained to see patterns in data, and the pattern here was loud: roughly half of college students don't even realize they need to build credit, and the ones who do keep hitting the same wall he did. The system assumed a parent, a history, a safety net. Millions of young people had none of those.

In 2021 he found his match in Scott Smith, a Detroit kid at Cornell who saw the same problem from a different angle. Carlo left Harvard at 19. Scott left Cornell at 21. Same year, same bet, two Ivy League exits to build a card for the students they'd just stopped being. Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch took them in.

Before Harvard, before Fizz, Kobe had done a stint as a product manager at Merantix, a Berlin AI research lab. It reads like a detour until you notice that machine learning now sits at the center of Mine - powering the underwriting, the anti-fraud, and the MoneyGPT assistant. The founder who couldn't get approved built a company that decides who gets approved, and does it with the tools he learned in Berlin.

Early on, Fizz spread the way college things spread - dorm by dorm, campus by campus. Within a year it was on 300-plus campuses, every Ivy League school included, and counting tens of thousands of customers. The card volume ran into nine figures. The kids who'd been told to wait had found a door.

Betting against financial nihilism

There's a phrase Kobe keeps circling: financial nihilism. The idea that a generation, priced out of houses and staring at meme stocks, has quietly decided the game is rigged and the only rational move is to gamble or give up. Mine is his argument against that. Not a lecture - a card, a coach, and a set of guardrails that make the boring path feel possible.

The mechanics are almost sneaky in their optimism. Make the responsible thing the default. Make credit-building the thing that happens automatically when you buy coffee, not a chore you have to remember. Put an adviser in the pocket of someone who'd never get a callback from a wealth manager. The genius isn't the technology. It's the refusal to accept that young people are a lost cause.

A member of the Forbes Finance Council, Kobe has spent his early twenties doing the thing he was rejected for at 19 - deciding who gets approved. Except now the answer, for a million people who'd otherwise have heard "no," is finally yes.