Advanta IRA gives retirement savers a way to put houses, private loans, gold and startup stakes inside tax-advantaged accounts. The freedom is real - and so is the paperwork.
The company that gave Wall Street a fear gauge now sells the pipes, prices and products behind an increasingly global, nearly round-the-clock market. Its advantage is less a single exchange than a feedback loop: invent the contract, gather the liquidity, distribute the data, then teach the next wave of traders how to use it.
Reku is an Indonesian investment platform that lets everyday users buy, sell and trade cryptocurrency alongside US stocks and ETFs from a single app. Founded in 2017 as Rekeningku.com and rebranded to Reku in 2022, the company positions itself as a low-fee, education-first exchange licensed by Indonesian regulators. It offers spot crypto, crypto futures, staking, OTC services and curated Reku Packs, and turned profitable in 2024 while serving hundreds of thousands of customers.
Modak (Modak Makers) is a San Francisco Bay Area fintech that gives kids and teens a no-fee Visa debit card paired with a gamified money app for families. Parents fund the card, assign chores, and monitor spending from a dashboard, while kids earn in-app rewards points called Mobucks (MBX) for completing challenges, walking, and learning good money habits. Founded in 2022 by ex-GGV Capital investor Madhu Yalamarthi and backed by a $5.3M seed round, Modak positions itself as a lower-cost, rewards-driven alternative to Greenlight and GoHenry, and says it serves 30,000+ families.
Madhu Yalamarthi is the cofounder and CEO of Modak, a fintech company building a Visa debit card and gamified family app that teaches kids and teens to manage money through chores, allowances, savings goals, and rewards. A first-generation high school graduate from rural India, he earned an MBA and MS from Stanford, where he made Arjay Miller Scholar (top 10%), then spent years as a Vice President at GGV Capital deploying roughly $200 million across 14 startups, five of which became unicorns. He left the investor's chair to build the thing he believed in: turning financial literacy into something kids actually want to practice.
Finhabits is a bilingual financial wellness platform built by Latinos, for Latinos, that turns small, automatic deposits into diversified investment portfolios. Founded by MIT-trained engineer Carlos Garcia, the New York fintech pairs low-minimum Roth and Traditional IRAs with Spanish-and-English financial education to close the wealth gap for first-time investors, serving hundreds of thousands of members who often start with as little as a few dollars a week.
Goalsetter is a New York-based financial education and banking platform that teaches American kids, teens, and families how to save, spend smart, and invest. Founded by Tanya Van Court, it blends FDIC-insured savings, a 'Learn to Earn' debit card, and pop-culture-flavored financial quizzes mapped to national standards. The company also runs Goalsetter Classroom, a K-12 curriculum used by schools, framing financial literacy as a tool for closing the racial wealth gap.

Tanya Van Court is the founder and CEO of Goalsetter, a New York-based fintech that teaches American families to save, spend, invest, and build wealth through debit cards with parental controls and culturally fluent, gamified financial-literacy quizzes. A Stanford-trained industrial engineer who ran digital products at ESPN, Nickelodeon, and Discovery Education, she launched Goalsetter in 2016 after her nine-year-old daughter asked for an investment account for her birthday. The company has raised tens of millions of dollars and drawn investors including Kevin Durant, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul, and Robert F. Smith, while pursuing Van Court's stated mission of closing the racial wealth gap.
Graham Stephan is an American personal finance YouTuber, real estate investor, and entrepreneur who turned a real estate license at age 18 into a multimillion-dollar media brand. Known for his signature 20-cent home-brewed coffee philosophy, he has amassed over 5 million YouTube subscribers by making money talk approachable, transparent, and relentlessly actionable. He also co-hosts The Iced Coffee Hour podcast, founded Bankroll Coffee, and built a rental property portfolio in the Los Angeles area before relocating to Las Vegas.

Kyla Scanlon is an economist, author, and content creator who coined the term 'vibecession' and has built a multi-platform media presence dedicated to making economics accessible. Her debut book 'In This Economy? How Money and Markets Really Work' (2024) became a New York Times bestseller. She reaches over 1 million followers across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Substack, and Twitter/X, and has been named to Barron's 100 Most Influential Women in U.S. Finance. A triple major from Western Kentucky University, she left a career in institutional asset management at Capital Group to pursue financial education full-time.

Ben Carlson is a CFA charterholder, Director of Institutional Asset Management at Ritholtz Wealth Management, and one of the most widely-read finance writers in the United States. Through his blog A Wealth of Common Sense, co-hosted podcast Animal Spirits, and six books, Carlson has built a reputation for translating Wall Street complexity into plain-English wisdom that ordinary investors can actually use - advocating for simplicity, patience, and behavioral discipline over market-timing and stock-picking.