Cryptomom, a Chicago startup, wants to make bitcoin and other forms of cryptocurrency investing more accessible to women.
The app, which will launch next month as a cryptocurrency investment platform marketed to women investors, carries the tagline: “The premiere destination for all things crypto for women, by women.”
The beta will launch with limited access on Oct. 5 and will provide financial tools to make cryptocurrency digestible and accessible.
The secure platform allows investors to buy and sell bitcoin, allocate bitcoin to education-savings plans and other investments, and give cryptocurrency as a gift for occasions like graduations and baby showers.
Kendra Cole, CEO and co-founder of the company, along with her husband, Lord Cole, launched the platform after an encounter with a nurse who was caring for one of their three daughters who had received a bone marrow transplant.
During the weekly treatments, Lord, the CTO of a global cryptocurrency firm, would take work calls throughout the day. One day one of the nurses said she had overheard his calls and wanted to learn more about cryptocurrencies.
“So Lord and our nurse cultivated a relationship where every week during clinic she would come back and ask him some more questions,” Kendra said. “After about three weeks, she was ready to start investing.”
But she still had a wide range of questions about how to start investing, how to gift cryptocurrency to her son, and more general questions about the platform she was using.
“After about three months, I went in one day and there were like six other nurses that were hoping to see my husband because they all wanted to get involved in crypto,” Kendra said. “I think that interaction, combined with my own pain point, made us realize that there are other highly educated millennial women that are out there — and there aren’t any platforms [for them].”
Kendra found that studies showing that women, who outlive men on average, make the majority of family investment and financial decisions, but that women avoided crypto because it felt “unsafe,” “volatile,” and “uninviting.”
Also, a CNBC report last year showed that twice as many men invest in cryptocurrency as women do.
“The other thing that we want to do in future iterations of our product is to have a robo advisor that takes gender-based considerations into play such as how [a user’s] salary and her current career trajectory are very different than men,” Cole said.
Kendra thinks the future is bright for cryptocurrency.
“We’re betting on that we think cryptocurrency is here to stay,” she said.
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