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Image Credits:Astor / Astor founder Lindsay Dorf
Fintech



ASTOR’S ‘COMMUNITY’ APPROACH TO FINANCIAL ADVICE AIMS TO HELP WOMEN FEEL MORE
CONFIDENT ABOUT INVESTING

Christine Hall
6:00 AM PDT · July 16, 2024



Among her friends, Lindsay Dorf is the one with the superpower of being able to
understand retail investing. So much so that she became the go-to person for
advice.

“I had a lot of friends come to me asking for investing advice,” Dorf told
TechCrunch. “There were two things I really saw: One, the people around me, they
were brilliant, but didn’t have confidence in investing. The other was that
there was so much that we’d figured out on the institutional side, from my time
at BlackRock, that just hadn’t made it to the retail investor sector.”




She started thinking about creating her own tool that she could put in front of
her friends to help them grow confidence in investing, particularly her women
friends. That’s how Astor, a free personal finance platform for women that
merges community and investing in an approachable way, came to be. It’s through
the community that women can feel more comfortable asking if they are making the
right decisions, Dorf said.  

After a user downloads Astor, they input all of their bank and brokerage
information into the app to understand the user’s current financial situation.
Users will be able to see the network of funds available, for example, an
emergency fund, savings goals, retirement investment accounts and personal
investment accounts. 

It’s similar to what the former financial planning app Mint would do to give a
picture of someone’s net worth, Dorf said. That said, Astor is not a brokerage,
and users can’t trade on the platform today.

> Digital investing platform for women, Ellevest, expands into banking

Astor also provides investing breakdowns to show annual returns and the user’s
investment strategy versus the market, like the S&P 500. Holdings are broken
down by performance, asset class and returns.

There’s also a gamified feature called Path to Wealth that takes a user’s money
strategy and uses insights as sort of a “Game of Life” to simplify the financial
journey, like starting an emergency fund, and once that is ready, what new
savings goals are attainable and approachable.



“We help you on this journey to figure out what’s your current state and what
you’re ready for,” Dorf said.

Here’s where the community aspect comes in: With investments, users can compare
their returns and portfolio breakdowns to other users. To value privacy, users
only see the percent allocations, but never the invested dollar amounts, Dorf
said.

“You can see your own risk and return for investments, then look at my profile
and see my risk and return,” she said. “For example your risk could be higher,
but your return is lower compared to my investments. You can then go into the
app and start a conversation about why that is. To learn from them why they
created the strategy they did, which empowers users.”

Example of Astor’s social and wealth dashboards.Image Credits:Astor

Why focus on women? Astor’s research found that women are three times more
likely to be confident investing when they know what people similar to them are
doing with their money. However, they aren’t finding it in some of the other
social investing platforms, for example, eToro, where most of the users are
male, Dorf said.




Women-focused fintech is quite a crowded space already, with companies like
Frich, Alinea, Ellevest, Your Juno and Clever Girl Finance, which Dorf considers
competitors.

However, Dorf said Astor is different in a few ways. One, many of the apps are
more in the classic financial aggregation space, think budgeting, where Astor’s
big focus is on investments. Another is that community functionality and helping
people be more confident in the strategy they choose and to learn from people in
the community, who are similar to you or have similar goals, about what’s best
in the short and long terms. 

“It’s a lot less about Astor giving advice, and a lot more about you joining the
platform, figuring out your situation and then using your community to make the
decision that you want to make,” Dorf said.

> Former teen model co-created app Frich to help Gen Z be more realistic about
> finances

In addition, Dorf’s background gives her an edge. Her first job out of college
10 years ago was part of BlackRock’s fintech platform called Aladdin, building
products for portfolio managers. She continued her top-notch career education at
Google, where she learned how to build tools for consumers and iterate on those
tools with users. 

When Dorf was ready to start building Astor in 2021, she applied to the two-year
MS/MBA program at Harvard, which is a joint program between the schools of
engineering and business. She called it “a bit like an incubator: You do the
engineering piece of actually building a product, and the business piece of
bringing it to market.”

While at Harvard, Dorf entered and won some business plan competitions. That
initial funding from NFX and MBA Fund enabled Astor to hire an engineering team
and start building in the second part of the second year in the program.

In March, the company closed on a total of $1.4 million from Stellation Capital,
TMV, NFX, MBA Fund and a group of angel investors. This enabled the company to
hire additional engineering, design and marketing employees so that it could
open its waitlist in April and bring over 2,000 users onto the platform by the
end of May.

Earlier this month, the company took away the waitlist and now has over 3,000
users. The audience is mostly women, ages 20 to 35 years old. Hundreds of
conversations are started on the platform each week, so Astor just brought on
certified financial planners to offer coaching to users.




Dorf declined to share more about how the company makes money at this time,
saying, “Right now, we’re learning from our audience, and will be introducing
new features and offerings in the upcoming months.”

From here, much of the company’s focus will be on product development, building
the user base and the community.

“We want our audience to see financial health as part of your overall health,”
Dorf said. “When you’re stressed about your money, it’s a massive source of
anxiety for you. Over the next few months, we’re creating that pillar of
financial wellness and new features users are asking for.”

Topics

Astor, Fintech, Fundraising, investment app, Lindsay Dorf, MBA Fund, NFX,
Startups




Christine Hall

Senior Reporter

@christinemhall

Christine Hall wrote about enterprise/B2B, e-commerce, and foodtech for
TechCrunch, and venture capital rounds for Crunchbase News. Based in Houston,
Christine previously reported for the Houston Business Journal, the Texas
Medical Center’s Pulse magazine, and Community Impact Newspaper. She has an
undergraduate journalism degree from Murray State University and a graduate
degree from The Ohio State University.

View Bio



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