It takes a certain kind of nerve to look at the yawning chasm of boring budgeting apps and think, “Let’s make it fun enough to actually use.” Tianqi “Albert” Wang and Eric Nguyen didn’t just have that thought, they turned it into Coverd, a fintech platform that treats your personal finances like a game you might actually want to win. Wang, an ex-quant from Hudson River Trading with an MIT pedigree, and Nguyen, a former Plaid engineer with a University of Washington master’s in computer science, didn’t arrive here by accident. They saw the engagement cliff in traditional budgeting tools, ran the math, and decided the only way to get people to stick with financial wellness was to make the experience addictive in all the right ways.
The app lets users bet against their own bills, rack up streak bonuses, and earn tiered cashback rewards, turning “responsible spending” from a chore into something that feels more like a Saturday night in Vegas, minus the regret. It is finance as a dopamine machine, driven by behavioral psychology and anchored in compliance. Underneath the playful surface sits real-time transaction ingestion via Plaid, a proprietary game engine for rewards, and an infrastructure running AWS microservices with Kubernetes orchestration. That is a lot of firepower for a budgeting app, but then again, Coverd is not playing the same game as the rest.
That difference just caught the attention, and the funding, of some serious players. Coverd closed a $7.8 million seed round led by Yolo Investments, with Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z Speedrun, Volt Capital, WndrCo, Arbitrum Gaming Catalyst, Tusk Ventures, Gaingels, Calm Ventures, and Multifaceted Capital piling in. Tim Heath from Yolo Investments and Anish Acharya from a16z now sit on the board, adding both fire and fuel to the company’s next phase.
With 65,000 registered users and a 55 percent monthly active rate, Coverd’s growth curve is pointed straight at the upper right. The funding will accelerate the launch of a branded Visa credit card in Q2 2026, complete with up to 5 percent cashback, while scaling the engineering and product teams and deepening U.S. penetration in the 22-to-40-year-old digital-native segment. There is also talk of integrating additional DeFi protocols and testing international waters in Canada and the U.K.
The U.S. gamified financial services market could hit $5 billion by 2028, and Coverd is moving like a company that wants more than just a slice. Wang, Nguyen, and their team, including COO Monica Lee and VP of Product Ravi Patel, are not just making finance less painful; they are making it magnetic. And in an industry where most apps fade into the background, that is a position worth being Coverd in.
