Open the app and the first thing you notice is what is missing. No 24.99% APR in microscopic gray text. No late-fee schedule buried in a PDF. No invitation to carry a balance you will spend two years regretting. Mine - the New York fintech that spent its first four years calling itself Fizz - is a money app for people who were told, repeatedly, that the financial system was rigged against them. Its entire pitch is that it does not have to be.
A money app that argues with a generation's despair
Mine sells a card. That is the easy part to describe. The hard part is the worldview it ships with. Roughly a million young adults use Mine, about 70% of them under 30, and most arrived believing the same thing: that credit scores are a trap, that saving is pointless, that the only honest way to get ahead is a lottery ticket dressed up as an investment. Mine exists to disagree, politely, with a spreadsheet open.
The company crossed $10 million in annual recurring revenue in early 2026, the same month it stopped being Fizz. The rebrand was not cosmetic. "Fizz" was a portmanteau - Financial Independence for Gen Z, plus a bonus Z - and it sounded like a seltzer. "Mine" is a noun a five-year-old understands. It is also, conveniently, the entire thesis: your money, your credit, your call.
"Financial independence begins with ownership - of your money, your momentum, and your decisions."Mine, on why a seltzer-sounding name had to go
The credit score paradox
Here is the trap that Mine was built to spring. To get good credit, you need a credit history. To get a credit history, you need credit. To get credit, you need good credit. For an 18-year-old with a part-time job and no co-signer, this loop is closed. The traditional escape hatches - a secured card requiring a deposit, or a starter card with a 30% interest rate and a generous appetite for late fees - tend to teach the wrong lesson. They reward the exact behavior, carrying a balance, that wrecks young finances.
And 18-to-24 year olds are the demographic that struggles most with delinquency and debt. So the standard on-ramp to adult finance hands its riskiest drivers the fastest car. It is the kind of arrangement that looks almost designed, if you are feeling cynical, and a lot of young people are.
"The same trend that makes people want to invest into crypto is a pretty big tailwind for us."Carlo Kobe, Co-founder & CEO
Two dropouts and a contrarian wager
Carlo Kobe and Scott Smith left Harvard and Cornell at 19 and 21 to build this, going through Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch during the height of the consumer-fintech boom. The boom faded; they did not. Their bet was unfashionable: that young people do not actually want to gamble their futures away - they just have not been offered a credible alternative to nihilism. Give them one that is honest and a little fun, the theory goes, and they will take it.
The legal entity is named ShoulderTap Technologies Inc., which is a better metaphor than most company names manage. A shoulder tap is a small, low-stakes nudge - not a lecture, not a sales pitch. That is roughly the relationship Mine wants with your bank account.
How the card actually works
Spend the debit way, get reported the credit way
No credit check. Your credit line is set by your bank-account balance, so you cannot spend money you do not have. Every purchase is effectively a tiny micro-loan, bundled into one daily repayment via autopay. That on-time payment history gets reported to Experian and TransUnion - so the boring act of buying coffee quietly builds your credit file. The card is issued through partner Lead Bank.
The short, eventful life of a money app
From dorm-room idea to AI money agent
From a card to a money agent
For its first chapter, Mine was a card with good manners. The second chapter is louder. In January 2026 the company launched MoneyGPT, an AI money agent that reads your linked accounts, learns how you actually spend, understands what you say you want, and then offers specific, practical advice across saving, spending and longer-term planning. The promise is not omniscience. It is a feeling the founders keep coming back to: control.
Underneath the card and the chatbot sits a fuller stack: budgeting and spend-tracking on a free tier, credit-score monitoring, financial-literacy courses built in a quiz format that 18-year-olds will tolerate, and cashback rewards with brands like Uber and Nike. The model is freemium - free budgeting and monitoring, paid tiers for card access and advanced tracking - topped up by card referrals and partner rewards.
"A debit card that builds credit" is a sentence that should not parse. Mine spent four years making sure it does.The contradiction at the center of the product
Funding, in two acts
Capital raised by round (USD millions)
Sources: PR Newswire, Fortune, TechCrunch, PYMNTS. ARR is annual recurring revenue, not capital raised - shown for scale.
Two nearly identical raises, two years apart, with one quiet difference: the first bought a card, the second bought an argument that the card was always the warm-up act.
Numbers that earn the headline
Skeptics are right to ask whether a mission survives contact with a P&L. So far, Mine's does. About a million users, roughly $10 million in recurring revenue, and a backer list - Kleiner Perkins, 359 Capital, FJ Labs, Y Combinator, U.S. News & World Report - that does not usually fund vibes. The credit-reporting partnerships with Experian and TransUnion are the load-bearing ones: without them, the card is just a prettier debit card. With them, it is a credit file that grows while you do nothing unusual.
The competitive set is crowded - Chime, Step, Cleo, Self, Kikoff, plus every secured card a bank will sell a teenager. Mine's wedge is the refusal to charge interest or fees, paired with an AI layer that the legacy players bolt on awkwardly, if at all.
Watch / Listen
See it in motion
Founder interviews and product walkthroughs live on the company's channels.
Hope, but with a repayment schedule
Strip away the AI and the cashback and Mine is selling one thing: the belief that financial independence is still available to people who were told it was not. The founders frame their competition not as other fintechs but as financial nihilism itself - the very tailwind that pushes a 22-year-old toward a prediction market is the one Mine wants to redirect toward a credit score that climbs.
It is an oddly old-fashioned ambition wrapped in a very modern interface. Build credit. Spend within your means. Learn how money works before it teaches you the hard way. The wrapper is gamified and chatty; the lesson underneath would not surprise your grandmother.
The on-ramp generation
A million young people are using a card that reports their good habits instead of profiting from their bad ones. If Mine is right, the cohort that grows up inside its app enters their thirties with credit files, savings reflexes, and an AI agent that has been watching their money since college. If it is wrong, it will still have proven that you can run a real business on the unfashionable premise that customers want to be better off.
Either way, the experiment is live, and the early returns are not nothing.
Open the app again, and the absence is the point. No trap. No fine print. Just a balance, a score going the right direction, and a small nudge on the shoulder.Back where we started
Find Mine
Mine (formerly Fizz) - ShoulderTap Technologies Inc. - 40 Wooster St, New York, NY 10013
Profile compiled from public sources: Fortune, TechCrunch, PYMNTS, PR Newswire, Crain's New York, Y Combinator. Figures approximate.