Pretio Interactive Exits the Portfolio; Billi Labs Enters
August 13, 2021
This Quarter, Alacrity Canada portfolio company Pretio Interactive, a data-driven media-buying agency for mobile application brands, announced the sale of the company to Bold Collective, a California-based growth marketing firm. As part of the deal, many of the current Pretio team transferred with the company and now work for Bold Collective. The remaining staff, however, moved instead into a new spinoff called Billi Labs.
As Tyrone Sinclair, former CEO of Pretio Interactive and current CEO of Billi Labs, put it, “This is an exciting development and marks the beginning of a new era for Pretio Interactive. For more than a decade, Pretio has focused on providing efficiency and high conversion rates for performance marketers. Pretio has enjoyed working with the Bold Collective crew over many of those years, and the Pretio team members who are now moving forward with them are excited about the future.”
Billi Labs, on the other hand, is taking a different track, aimed at the evolution of the financial marketplace. This is a larger, more diverse environment than ever, with more open and aggressive competition among banks, other lenders, brokers, mortgage firms, investment platforms and other service providers – many of whom are digital-only. For example, with more than 50% of Canadians now banking at more than one physical or virtual institution, the average person already manages several different bank accounts.
This expanded market does provide more access to more products, in many cases more easily, but with that comes fragmented security processes, user experiences, information flows, fee structures and more. The lack of effective integration between services and accounts makes it hard to track total spending, for example, or to flag missed payments or avoid extra fees. In reality, it is harder now to keep regular track of where all one’s money is and where it is going. Perhaps it is no coincidence then that fifty-four percent of Canadians state they do not have any overarching financial plan today.
The Billi team has created a SaaS platform to help individuals better manage this range of financial services and tasks. Billi is an inclusive application that allows users to connect and control multiple financial accounts, and uses Open-Finance standards to gather and unify this cross-institution information. It then uses secure AI and machine learning technologies to clean and categorize all relevant data, analyze individual trends and patterns, and present the results in a clear and concise user interface. This enables the user to track and manage cross-institution spending, subscription and bill payment activities, and even forecast the future, set goals, and make ongoing, informed financial decisions.
The waitlist for this new personal finance tool is currently open and the platform will be launched in Public Beta later this summer. For more information visit billi.app