She bought a building with no kitchen, no bedrooms, and no working plumbing. Twelve months later it was a home. Then it became Castle.
Madeline Hung runs Castle, a fintech with a deceptively domestic premise: your home is the single largest line item of your financial life, and almost nobody manages it with real data. Castle wants to be the software layer that automates, consolidates, and shrinks that spend.
The company sits in Hudson, New York, a two-hour drift up the river from the Manhattan apartment Hung left in the summer of 2020. The pitch is plain enough to fit on a napkin - help people save time and money managing the most expensive thing they own - but the conviction behind it was earned the slow way, with a tape measure and a stack of receipts she could never quite reconcile.
Castle is co-founded with Hugo Van Vuuren and Jordan Hayashi, and it has raised a reported $2.6M seed round. The keyword cloud around the company reads like a homeowner's anxiety dream rendered as a product roadmap: bill pay automation, property tax exemptions, rebate claims, transaction monitoring, AI receipt extraction, home records digitization. Each one started as something Hung personally could not get a straight answer on.
With her Manhattan lease about to expire, Hung and her husband went looking upstate and fell for the Hudson Valley - the old architecture, the green that goes on for a while. What they bought was not a house. It was a historic photography studio with no kitchen, no bedrooms, and plumbing and lighting that mostly worked in theory. They decided to convert it themselves.
Living in it was supposed to be the happy ending. Instead it was the data problem. Despite spreadsheets and dozens of hours benchmarking costs, tracking the money felt, in her words, like writing paper checks into a black hole. Then came the sequel - maintenance fees, a jump in property taxes, heating bills, and an insurer that dropped their coverage without much warning.
The couple could afford the surprises. That was almost the point. The discomfort wasn't the money itself - it was spending blindly, throwing cash at problems they suspected were avoidable if only someone had handed them the right number at the right moment. That gap is Castle's entire reason to exist.
Hung grew up in a real-estate-minded family where home improvement wasn't a chore, it was a trophy cabinet. The household legends: grandparents who spent years restoring a federal townhouse, a mother who bailed out a flooding basement while eight months pregnant, a father who took time off work to build a log cabin from scratch.
The lesson she absorbed early was that a home is two things at once - the ultimate canvas for creative expression, and a genuine engine of upward mobility. Real estate, in that telling, is an optimization problem where beauty and asset appreciation happen to point the same direction. Castle is that worldview, ported into a finance app.
Castle is not Hung's first founding story. Before fintech, she co-founded The Good Country alongside Simon Anholt, the strategist best known for ranking nations by how much good they do beyond their own borders - an idea Anholt framed as a country with no territory and a global citizenry. Hung helped build the project and appeared on podcasts making the case for cross-border problem solving.
Her earlier work threads through human rights and social impact - research and business development touching organizations like Oxfam America and Health Leads, plus roles connected to Remesh, Waypoint International, and Ellis. The throughline isn't real estate. It's the same instinct every time: big decisions get made badly when people don't have good data, so go build the data.
Illustrative reading of Castle's thesis, drawn from Hung's public writing. Not financial data.
Homeowners make critical financial decisions in a vacuum - without proper data or benchmarks - despite homes being their largest assets.
A home is both the ultimate source of creative expression and upward mobility.
Every homeowner deserves more when it comes to managing their biggest asset: their home.
After a crash-course 12 months, the house was livable and we moved in.
Ask what Castle is really after and the answer scales past bill pay. Hung wants the home to have actual infrastructure - the unglamorous plumbing of payments, records, and benchmarks that lets a homeowner decide instead of guess. The home is the largest consumer category in the country, and it has been running on spreadsheets and paper checks for a very long time.
It's a tidy loop. The family that celebrated renovations as achievements raised a founder who turned a renovation into a company. The studio became a house. The house became a thesis. And the spreadsheet she couldn't make work became the product she's betting nobody should ever have to keep again.