Grifin just raised $11M to do something that sounds so obvious, it’s almost criminal it didn’t exist before: turn your daily spending into daily investing.
Here’s the play. You swipe your card at Target, and $1 quietly slides into Target stock. Starbucks gets your $6.75 latte? Another dollar slides into SBUX. Your wallet bleeds a little, your portfolio builds a little. It’s investing that follows your life, not the other way around. And that’s the kind of simplicity that makes Wall Street sweat.
Founded in 2017 by Aaron Froug and Bo Starr, now Co-CEOs, and Robin Froug, Chief Strategy Officer, Grifin didn’t crawl out of some Sand Hill pitch deck echo chamber. It was born in Gainesville, Florida, after the team asked college students why they weren’t investing. The answer wasn’t fear, it was friction. So they built a product that makes investing feel as familiar as shopping. You spend. You own. You build wealth while ordering Taco Bell at 1:14 a.m., which is more than most robo-advisors can promise.
And now, with Nava Ventures leading their $11M Series A, joined by TTV Capital, Draper Associates, Gaingels, Nevcaut Ventures, and Alloy Labs, Grifin is scaling the rails. Freddie Martignetti from Nava joins the board, bringing pedigree that includes Warby Parker and Drizly. This isn’t just another round, it’s a validation of consumer-first fintech by investors who know how to pick long-game winners.
They’ve got receipts, too. 500,000+ registered users. 100,000 new installs in the month before the raise. Viral TikTok momentum. And a user base mostly made up of women aged 40–60, arguably the most underappreciated financial demographic in fintech. When Grifin users bought Walmart stock, they reportedly spent 234% more there over the next six months. Read that again. This isn’t just investment automation, it’s retail behavior looped back into asset growth. That’s Adaptive Investing™, and it’s patent-pending.
From the backend (AWS, microservices, PostgreSQL) to the brokerage integration (Alpaca Securities LLC, SIPC covered), they’re building like this is mission-critical, which it is. Because 178 million Americans still don’t own stock. Not because they don’t want to. Because they weren’t invited in. Grifin’s about to change that.
Family plans, AI guidance, HR platform integrations, it’s all coming in hot. But the story here isn’t roadmap hype. It’s execution. It’s clarity. It’s leadership with skin in the game and a grip on what real people need.
Grifin isn’t trying to disrupt investing. They’re making it so seamless, it slips past resistance and becomes default behavior.
And that? That’s how you change the market. One swipe at a time.
