Techcrunch is reporting that Intuit (Previous Cloud Ave coverage of Intuit can be found here, here, here and here), the company that offers financial and accounting SaaS solutions to Small Businesses, is acquiring the personal finance service Mint (Previous Cloud Ave coverage of Mint can be found here and here) for $170 Million. Launched in 2007, with a seed funding from First Round Capital, Mint claims more than 1 Million users. Launched in one of the previous Techcrunch50 (okay, 40) event, Mint offers users an easy way to manage all their personal finances. It automatically pulls up bank, credit card and other loan information directly from the financial institutions and gives users an up to date overview of their money and, also, information about their spending habits.
Even though some users were initially wary of putting their financial information on the clouds, they embraced it eventually once they realized that Mint offers the same level of security like the major banks and other financial institutions in US and elsewhere in the world. Mint has been one of the success stories on the SaaS front helping the consumers manage their personal finances. Intuit has built an empire helping small businesses with their wide variety of features. This acquisition gives Intuit a foothold on the consumer market side.
Mint had three rounds of funding from First Round Capital, Shasta ventures, Benchmark Capital, Startup Fund, etc.. They have raised around $32 Million from these rounds and they were valued at $140 Million. There were some reports about Mint going after Freshbooks and with this acquisition, it will be interesting to see how it plays out. I hope our Accounting 2.0 specialist Ben Kepes offers more insight into this acquisition. (Update – more from Ben here and from Zoli here.)
