Kleiner Perkins leads $14.4M seed round into Fizz, a credit-building debit card aimed at Gen Z college students
Summary
The best way to do this, they decided, was to make its core an artificial intelligence budgeting product and to offer gamified financial literacy courses presented in a fun and interactive quiz format. Its target demographic is college students, aged 18 to 24.Uniquely, the duo also decided to build their own infrastructure from scratch instead of, as they put it,becoming a patchwork quilt of fintech SaaS vendors. It also uses campus ambassadors and TikTok to promote its offering.Fizz is a portmanteau acronym of Financial Independence for Gen Z, with an extra Z added for punch (and should not be confused with another startup with the same name that is a social network for college students). It primarily competes with cards from big banks such as Discover, Capital One and Bank of America, as well as with Rocket Money and Credit Karma on its budgeting and AI feature set.German immigrant Kobe (CEO) and Smith, who hails from Detroit, said they were driven to start Fizz from their own experiences as young college students.I couldnt get a credit card because my parents couldnt co-sign, Kobe recalls, and I didnt want to put down a large security deposit. So our angle is telling them, OK, you need credit to lease an apartment and get a car and even one day get a mortgage.Knowing that this group of customers needs not only credit, but also the tools to learn to use it wisely, Fizz offers a suite of financial literacy content, as well as budgeting software and other help.Its not like our cardholders just have a payment device; they have access to budgeting tools, savings tips and a one-on-one financial adviser, Scott said.The pair also take pride in the fact that they launched Fizzs product with two direct banking partnerships.