Featured Startup Pitch: Tellur – Virtual assistant for banking and budgeting chores

COMPANY: Tellur

ELEVATOR PITCH

Tellur saves you time and money by automating your personal finance chores.

PRODUCT/SERVICE DESCRIPTION

Tellur is a virtual assistant for your banking and budgeting chores. We take the tedium out of managing your money by automating common tasks. You tell us what to watch for and how to respond. We’ll track those tasks around the clock, so you don’t have to remember.

Possible tasks include:

Whenever I spend money at Starbucks, text me how much money I have left to spend on food this month.
When my paycheck arrives, move 10% into my emergency fund, if its balance is less than three months income.
When my monthly cable bill increases, remind me to renegotiate a new promotional rate.

DIFFERENTIATORS VS. THE COMPETITION

Some banks offer a few basic alerts, but they have two major problems. The first is they usually lack customization. The bigger problem is they only give you simple information about balances and transactions. With Tellur, our notifications are completely tailored for specific situations. You’ll receive relevant, actionable advice that can help you stay ahead of your money.

Compared to other financial apps, the biggest difference with Tellur is that the data comes to you. Instead of logging into a dashboard of pie charts and transactions tables, we send relevant information at the moment you need it. You’re in control of the alerts you receive. That means you’ll never be swamped with irrelevant information.

Tellur is focused on highly-specific, timely notifications. We don’t see ourselves as a replacement for all-in-one budgeting apps like Mint or Personal Capital. In fact, a lot of our users set up alerts to help them stay on track with the budgets they’ve created elsewhere.

FOUNDERS’ STORY

My co-founder Will and I were frustrated by the inconvenience of personal finance managers like Mint.com and Quicken. The dashboards they provide are great, but needing to remember to check the app each day was annoying.

The alerts provided by our banks were better in concept — I’d get a text when something changed — but worse in implementation. Banks didn’t send alerts for the things we cared about and didn’t offer a way to create them.

Inspired by the success of task-based platforms like IFTTT, we decided to build a task-based system to automate tedious personal finance tasks.

HEADQUARTERS: Chicago

WEBSITE: tellur.io

FOUNDERS: Will Thomsen, CEO; David Bild, CTO

INVESTORS: Bootstrapped, but looking to raise

YEAR FOUNDED: 2015

TWITTER: @GetTellur

FACEBOOK: facebook.com/GetTellur