Personal finance website NerdWallet is coming for your retirement questions. The San Francisco-based company has made its first acquisition in the form of retirement planning startup aboutLife.

San Francisco-based NerdWallet was founded in 2009 by CEO Tim Chen and Jacob Gibson, and is focused on educating consumers — particularly millennials — to make financial decisions. While the company started out with a product that compared bank-provided credit cards, it now offers comparison tools that provide information on credit cards, college loans, banking, mortgage loans, stock trading and insurance policies.

Prior to the company’s founding, Chen was a hedge fund analyst at Perry Capital, and earlier was an equity research analyst at Credit Suisse First Boston. Gibson, since replaced as COO by Dan Yoo, was a derivatives trader at J.P. Morgan Chase. Yoo joined the company from LinkedIn, where he was vice president of business operations and analytics.

The company has grown rapidly, with 30 million users on its website by 2014, and by 2015, numbering Vikram Pandit and James D. Robinson III among the members of its board of advisors. The company also raised a first-round $64 million in funding in 2015, with an estimated valuation of $500 million.

AboutLife, for its part, was characterized by TechCrunch as “another personal finance tools company … joining the fray” of Web-based services “trying to drive traditional financial planners into extinction.” Started by Rajat Kongovi, who serves as CEO, the four-year-old company has also raised Series A funding, to the tune of $3 million. Kongovi is a former project leader at Boston Consulting Group who later served as COO of the social network Hi5.

“The aboutLife team has made great strides in understanding the retirement challenges Americans face,” Chen said in a statement. He added, “That expertise, alongside their underlying technology and skills, are huge assets for NerdWallet as we establish ourselves as consumers’ go-to resource for retirement planning.”

Instant Insights /

NerdWallet acquires retirement planning startup 'aboutLife'

More From HR Executive

Related Stories

Recommended For You