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Mical Jeanlys-White built WealthMore out of frustration. 

She spent years on Wall Street, building products at American Express and serving as a managing director at JPMorgan Chase. She realized the finance industry still had a long way to go when it came to helping consumers build and understand wealth. 

“Seventy percent of Americans do not have access to a wealth adviser due to high account minimums and high fees, yet those with a wealth adviser grow 2x more wealth,” she told TechCrunch. “When I tried to find a wealth adviser, I came across the same frustrating, broken experience.” 

Her response was to launch WealthMore, an investment platform that requires only a $5,000 minimum to connect customers with adviser-led portfolios, licensed wealth advisers, and financial planning services. 

The idea came to her while she was riding her Peloton, naturally. 

“I like to say that WealthMore is Peloton meets wealth management,” she said. “Our goal is to normalize that for the 99%. When more people do better financially, the social and multiplier impact is significant.” 

After two years of building the company, the company quietly launched its beta in June and is officially announcing it today, right here, in TechCrunch. 

Building this product has been a deeply personal journey for Jeanlys-White. Her grandmother immigrated to the U.S. from Haiti and was the family’s unofficial money coach. She, like many immigrants, was part of a savings club, which helped her hit goals and put a down payment on a home. She enjoyed talking about money and being around people with similar interests. 

“But her money languished in low-interest paying savings accounts and CDs,” Jeanlys-White continued. “She never made a banker’s call list. With the benefit of a wealth adviser, she could have been a millionaire and created generational wealth.” 

The racial wealth gap is wide. Federal data shows that though the median Black wealth increased from $27,970 to $44,890 between 2019 and 2022, the numbers are still behind other racial groups. Hispanic households have a median wealth of $62,000, white households’ wealth stands at $295,000 and Asian American households have a median wealth of $536,000. The 2021 U.S. Census found that white households hold 80% of the wealth in this country compared to the 4.7% owned by Black families. That racial wealth gap has been hard to close, with some experts believing it could take another hundred years to even come close. 

Jeanlys-White notes that women can lose out on up to at least $1.2 million due to the gender pay gap, and only 49% of Black women have a 401K compared to 62% of overall adults. “The wage gap is a key contributor to the retirement savings and wealth gap,” she said. 

Image Credits: WealthMore (screenshot)

Surveying potential users and building the brand 

Before Jeanlys-White started building the platform, she surveyed over 300 potential users to see what they would be willing to pay for. That helped her determine the company’s pricing levels — there are three tiers, starting at $25 a month for a $5,000 minimum account size — and the design of the website. It has partnered with Apex Clearing Corporation to provide brokerage services. 

To help build the brand, the company released lifestyle products, such as clothing, and hosted wealth-building conversations at hair salons, doctor’s offices, and conferences. “People were willing to be honest and vulnerable with us.” In addition, Jeanlys-White made sure to have diverse wealth advisers on the platform, saying that wealth builders often do not see themselves represented in the industry.  

On the app, the company has created communities such as #firstgenwealth and #newinvestors for people to join and host activities and events.  “We created communities, like #blkwomenwealth, to address these unique factors and empower our community to leverage investing and sound financial planning to get ahead,” Jeanlys-White told TechCrunch. (She said users can find her in #firstgenwealth, #blkwomenwealth, and #womenwhowealth). 

Despite a difficult funding environment for fintechs, Jeanlys-White started fundraising for her company in October 2023 and closed an oversubscribed pre-seed round of at least $1 million led by Emmeline Ventures in April 2024. Other investors include a16z TxO, the BFM Fund, and First Row Partners. 

She recalled early investors raised concerns about previous fintechs who struggled in this space, but she continued to hone the company’s story.

“Once investors could ‘see’ the product, our fundraising traction changed dramatically,” she said. 

Currently, there are 10 people on the team. The first hire was the head of engineering, as Jeanlys-White was not a technical founder and needed someone to help get the product into the hands of users, she said. 

She hopes the company can come out of beta mode around the end of the year, in time to help people with their financial New Year’s resolutions. For now, Jeanlys-White is just excited to see people start engaging with the platform and thinks back to her grandmother’s experience. 

“She would have loved WealthMore,” she said, noting she especially would have loved the communities. “Our wealth advisers would have helped her overcome her fear of the stock market and that would have been a huge win. She’s smiling down on WealthMore.”

This post was updated to correct the name of the community groups on WealthMore.

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It’s been just over two months since we published our last robotics jobs post. The world of automation continues to excite and surprise, as the rise of generative AI opens new avenues for human-robot collaboration.

From the looks of things, companies in the category can’t hire quickly enough. That’s a good problem for you, the robotics job seeker. If this is the living you chose, pat yourself on the back: Someone out there wants to hire you.

As ever, the most fascinating part of compiling this list is the breadth of subject matters covered by robotics and automation. Getting a gig in robotics could land you in the restaurant game, pet care, climate or space.

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A crew of tech billionaires have been trying to get the California Forever project off the ground, which would create a new, supposedly utopian city on land north of the Bay Area. That project is on hold until 2026, when it’s likely to appear on local ballots, but TechCrunch learned that this isn’t the only development project in the works from the technorati. 

Marc Andreessen, who is an investor in the California Forever project, also has connections to another development project nearby. His wife, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, is the daughter of Silicon Valley real estate mogul John Arrillaga, Sr., who left his children some land in the same area that California Forever wants to build. Arrillaga-Andreessen’s brother has begun the approval process to build a mixed-use development with over 1,000 homes.

Why are these influential families racing to develop this land, and how are locals reacting? We’re unpacking it on today’s TechCrunch Minute.

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Automatically disappearing posts on social networks could be handy for users who have a habit of deleting their posts through third-party tools, or if the context of those posts is short-lived. Earlier this month, Threads said it was testing ephemeral posts only as an internal prototype. Now, the company told TechCrunch that it is testing posts that disappear within 24 hours with a limited number of users.

While the company didn’t provide any statement, a spokesperson said this is a new and casual way to share on Threads. It also didn’t disclose if the experiment is region-specific or who could activate such posts.

App reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi published an ephemeral post on Friday. When you tap on the reply button, you an see the time remaining, after which the post will be deleted. Threads also shows a banner on top of the post indicating that the thread and all replies will disappear when the time ends. While the banner doesn’t specify anything about quoted replies, we observed that quoted posts have a timer similar to the original post and will disappear after the timer ends.

Image Credits: Screenshot by TechCrunch

In June, Paluzzi first posted about Threads working on disappearing posts with a screenshot highlighting a 24-hour button next to the Post button to publish a disappearing thread. Technologist Christ Messina also found hints about these posts in the iOS app’s code earlier this month. Messina noted that disappearing posts won’t be shared with the fediverse as Threads won’t be able to delete these posts from other ActivityPub-powered servers. Threads started allowing users to share their posts with the fediverse in June.

Posts with a 24-hour expiry could help creators who want to share an off-brand or off-topic post once in a while. They could also be useful for folks who want to post commentary on live events that might be difficult to understand out-of-context, or irrelevant once the event is over.

In a pre-Elon Musk era, Twitter started an Instagram Stories-like format for disappearing posts called Fleets in 2020 but shut it down in 2021 because of low usage.

If Threads makes ephemeral posts widely available, it might be one of the only social networks among its rivals — such as X, Bluesky, and Mastodon — to do so.

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RealPage, which makes property management software, was sued Friday by the U.S. Justice Department and eight attorneys general for allegedly helping apartment and building managers around the country collude to drive up unit prices.

The Richardson, Texas-based outfit is accused of contracting with rival landlords to absorb info about their rates and lease terms to train RealPage’s recommendation algorithms, and in the process discouraging competition among property owners who defer to the company’s recommendations on pricing and other terms.

It’s the DOJ’s first big algorithmic collusion case and comes as rent in the U.S. skyrockets, climbing 33% since March 2020, according to Zillow.

RealPage, which was acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo in 2021 for $10.2 billion, commands 80% of the market for commercial revenue management software for conventional multi-family housing rentals in the U.S., according to the lawsuit. The company denies any wrongdoing.

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Colorful Capital, which launched in 2022 to focus on investing in LGBTQIA+-identifying founders, will end its attempts at raising a fund, according to an email seen by TechCrunch. It’s unclear if the firm is shutting down for good. 

Colorful Capital’s co-founders, William Burckart and Megan Kashner, declined to comment. 

A former employee who used to work on the investment team and asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation told TechCrunch that this fund would have been the firm’s first and that Colorful has been struggling to raise it since it launched two years ago. At that time, it was trying to raise at least $10 million to do 13 pre-seed deals and 12 seed deals, with check sizes starting at $300,000. The idea was to co-lead deals and cut follow-on checks, too, the employee, who was familiar with the matter, said. PitchBook shows that since its launch, the firm made four investments, including into clothing company Springrose and health tech Mate Fertility. 

“It’s unfortunate,” the former employee said. 

This news comes amid wider investor pullback from businesses and organizations focused on some element of diversity, equity and inclusion. Black founders are seeing a dip in funding, while tech organizations like Girls in Tech and Women Who Code have had to shutter. The venture fundraising market has been tough for many firms and founders, especially emerging fund managers, Bloomberg reported. Unless one is already a big, splashy name — or raising in AI — the stakes to get money from investors and LPs have become much, much higher. 

“We’re going to start seeing more stories like this as the market continues to consolidate,” the former employee said. 

During its time, Colorful Capital wrote white papers about the lack of venture capital dollars flowing to LGBTQIA+ founders and garnered support from the wider community as it sought to achieve venture equity, according to the email. Burckart and Kashner wrote that they were proud of the support they’ve received in the past few years and that they would keep working on advancing capital access for the LGBTQIA+ community in individual capacities. 

“Rest assured,” the email concluded. “You will continue to see us on the front lines.”

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AI models are being applied to every dataset under the sun, but are inconsistent in their outcomes. This is as true in the medical world as anywhere else, but a startup called Piramidal believes it has a sure thing with a foundational model for analyzing brain scan data.

Cofounders Dimitris Sakellariou and Kris Pahuja have observed that electroencephalography (EEG) technology, while used in practically every hospital, is fragmented among many types of machines and requires specialized knowledge to interpret. A piece of software that can consistently flag worrisome patterns, regardless of time, location, or equipment type could improve outcomes for folks with brain disorders, while taking some of the load off overworked nurses and doctors.

“In the neural ICU, there are nurses actually monitoring the patient and looking for signs on the EEG. But sometimes they have to leave the room, and these are acute conditions,” said Pahuja. An abnormal reading or alarm could mean an epileptic episode, or a stroke, or something else — nurses don’t have that training, and even specialist doctors may recognize one but not the other.

The two started the company after working for years on the feasibility of computational tools in neurology. They found there is absolutely a way to automate analysis of EEG data that is beneficial for care, but that there’s no simple way to deploy that technology where it’s needed.

“I have experience with this, and I mean I’ve been sitting next to neurologists in the operating room to understand exactly why these brainwaves are useful, and how we can build computational systems to identify them,” said Sakellariou. “They’re helpful in many contexts, but every time you use an EEG device, you have to rebuild the whole system for that specific problem. You need to get new data, you need to have humans annotate the data from scratch.”

That would be hard enough if every EEG system, hospital IT setup, and data format were the same, but they vary widely in the most basic elements, like how many electrodes are on the machine and where they’re placed.

Cofounders Dimitris Sakellariou (left) and Kris Pahuja.Image Credits: Piramidal

Piramidal’s founders believe — and claim to know, though this culmination of their work is not yet published — that a foundational model for EEG readings could make life-saving brainwave pattern detection work out-of-the-box rather than after months of studies.

To be clear, it’s not meant to be a do-it-all medical platform — a closer analogue may be Meta’s Llama series of (relatively) open models, which foot the initial expense of creating the foundational capability of language understanding. Whether you build a customer service chatbot or a digital friend is up to you, but neither works without the fundamental ability to understand human language.

But AI models aren’t limited to language — they can be trained to work in fluid dynamics, music, chemistry, and more. For Piramidal, the “language” is brain activity, as read by EEGs, and the resulting model would notionally be capable of understanding and interpreting signals from any setup, any number of electrodes or model of machine, and any patient.

No one has yet built one — at least, not publicly.

Although they were careful not to overstate their current progress, Sakellariou and Pahuja did say, “We have built the foundational model, we have run our experiments on it, and now we are in the process of productionizing the code base so it is ready to be scaled to billions of parameters. It’s not about research — from day one it’s been about building the model.”

The first production version of this model will be deployed in hospitals early next year, Pahuja said. “We’re working on four pilots starting in Q1; all four of them will test in the ICU, and all four want to co-develop with us.” This will be a valuable proof of concept that the model works in the diverse circumstances presented by any care unit. (Of course PIramidal’s tech will be over and above any monitoring the patients would normally be provided.)

The foundation model will still need to be fine-tuned for certain applications, work that Pahuja said they will do themselves at first; unlike many other AI companies, they don’t plan to build a foundation model and then rake in fees from API usage. But they were clear that it’s still incredibly valuable as-is.

“There’s no world where a model trained from scratch will do better than a pretrained model like ours; having a warm start can only improve things,” Sakellariou said. “It’s still the biggest EEG model that has ever existed, infinitely larger than anything else out there.”

To move forward, Piramidal needs the two things essential to every AI company: money and data. The first they have a start on, with a $6 million seed round co-led by Adverb Ventures and Lionheart Ventures, with participation by Y Combinator and angel investors. That money will go towards compute costs (huge for training models) and staffing up.

As far as data goes, they have enough to get their first production model trained. “It turns out there’s a lot of open source data — but a lot of open source siloed data. So we’ve been in the process of aggregating and harmonizing that into a big integrated data store.”

The partnerships with the hospitals should provide valuable and voluminous training data, though — thousands of hours of it. This and other sources could help elevate the next version of the model beyond human capability.

Right now, Sakellariou said, “We can address confidently this set of defined patterns doctors look out for. But a bigger model will let us pick out patterns smaller than the human eye can consistently and empirically tell exist.”

That’s still a ways off, but superhuman capability is not a prerequisite to improving the quality of care. The ICU pilots should allow the tech to be evaluated and documented much more rigorously, both in scientific literature and likely in investors’ meeting rooms.

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