Announcing twocents's $3M Preseed Round

Two Cent Software, Inc. has raised $3 million from Dragonfly and Starting Line.

This is especially ironic since I built this app to try to figure out how broke I was.

twocents is an anonymous social network where your username is your net worth. I started building it when I realized my own financial anxiety was much more universal than I naively assumed. Everyone I met had a muddy sense of their standing, plus big unanswered questions about careers, budgets, and investments. Figuring that sunlight was the best disinfectant, I set out to build a digital leaderboard to finally uncover where we all stood.

Along the way, I stumbled into a bigger problem: social media finance is broken. Most spaces are clogged with spam, sponsored influencers and fake advice from unverified sources. Most anonymous apps lack accountability, and traditional social media hides the real financial picture. We all know someone who quietly took on massive credit card debt or even loans to fund a grandiose vacation that looked amazing on Instagram but torched their savings. We're ending this clout loophole here: twocents is the only platform with posts from people who are verified to own the wealth they claim to have.

This couldn't have existed before. We're leveraging the post-2020 cultural shift towards financial transparency, driven by Gen Z and retail investing. Modern fintech infrastructure — Plaid, the EU’s Open Banking initiative, and the crypto ecosystem's public ledgers — enables secure, read-only access to users’ assets. Plaid, trusted by apps like Venmo and Robinhood, allows us to view asset information without compromising your privacy. We can’t move your money, make trades, or access any private data. Finally, we're building on top of 20 years of social networking lessons, learning from the greats and carefully aligning our incentives to avoid the usual consumer social landmines.

Two Cent Software was officially incorporated right before Christmas of 2024, when Long Journey Ventures scout Ti Morse saw my announcement post on his timeline and took a red-eye flight from Anchorage to Brooklyn to cut me an angel check at Bushwick Diner. It has been an unbelievable journey (literally, nobody believes me) going from that night to launching our private TestFlight beta in February, to welcoming our first liquid millionaire on March 26, to having a viral moment in June that tripled our userbase and raised our Connected Asset Value to over $150 million, to raising this preseed round. Along the way, I've met with users from all backgrounds, leveraging their own financial experience to shape our roadmap and build an inclusive home for the future social finance.

We're using this round to grow the team immediately (more on this soon) and prepare us for the big leagues: an App Store launch by the end of the year, plus cross platform Android and Web apps ASAP. We're already working with lawyers and cybersecurity firms to make sure we're dotting our I's and crossing our T's, and we’re continuing to listen closely to our users as we build and roll out new features. (Soon we may even be able to listen to them in anonymous chat rooms...)

I am especially grateful to our early believers: Ti Morse, Besart Copa, Balaji Srinivasan, Matt Gagliano, Albulena Kadriu, Esra Fejzullahu, plus our hilarious (and anonymous!) early power users, without whom twocents wouldn't exist. I also want to thank Charles Li for being an exceptional mentor and going to bat for us while we navigated our first official fundraise. Last but certainly not least, I want to thank Dragonfly and Starting Line again, who are of course betting on me as a solo founder on top of twocents the company.

I'm still kind of broke, but it's a start.