Fennel is a New York-based mobile investing app that lets everyday retail investors trade commission-free stocks and ETFs while surfacing digestible ESG data and shareholder-voting information for the companies they own. Founded in 2022 by former physics PhD and dark-matter researcher Daniel Naim, Fennel positions itself as a B Corp-certified brokerage that refuses payment for order flow and does not lend out customer shares - so votes stay with the shares. For a $4.99 monthly subscription, users get 25+ financial metrics, 200+ ESG indicators, AI-powered news sentiment, and tools to follow past and upcoming shareholder ballots.
M1 is a Chicago-based personal finance platform that bundles investing, borrowing, and spending into a single app it calls 'The Finance Super App.' Built around customizable 'Pies' that let people design a portfolio of stocks and ETFs and automate contributions and rebalancing, M1 aims to give self-directed investors the kind of automated, low-cost money management once reserved for the wealthy. Founded in 2016 by Brian Barnes, the company has raised more than $300 million and surpassed $10 billion in assets under management.
Ostium is an onchain perpetuals exchange built on Arbitrum that lets anyone long or short real-world assets - stocks, commodities, indices, forex and crypto - directly from a self-custodial wallet, with up to 200x leverage and no broker in the middle. Founded by Harvard classmates and former Bridgewater hands Kaledora Kiernan-Linn and Marco Antonio Ribeiro, Ostium uses synthetic perpetuals and a custom oracle system to bring traditional markets onchain. It has processed tens of billions in cumulative trading volume and raised $27.8M total, including a $20M Series A co-led by General Catalyst and Jump Crypto in December 2025.
Alpaca is a developer-first brokerage infrastructure company providing APIs and a self-clearing custody platform that lets fintechs, banks and trading apps embed access to US stocks, options, crypto and fixed income for customers in 40+ countries. Often called the AWS of finance, it powers more than 300 financial institutions and millions of brokerage accounts globally.