Partean cares about personal finance, so you don’t have to – TechCrunch

son of Iranian immigrants, Arman Hazerkhani He spent his final year in high school brainstorming three-part ideas about what he wanted to dedicate his career to. First, he said that education is the most effective way to make an impact on the individual, society and the world. Second, he believes technology is the most scalable way to spread this effect. Third, and finally, he believes that strong business incentives and for-profit businesses in particular are the most sustainable way to make a final impact — not for nonprofits or government organizations.

Hirzarkhani’s early energy brought him to Carnegie Mellon University, where he studied electrical and computer engineering, and Google, where he spent time on developer programs and Google for Education. Fittingly, however, when it came time to join Google full-time, he turned down an offer to create an edtech startup — one that would help young professionals like him create ongoing, daily structured education but without feeling like a chore. After all, not every high school student writes a three-part dissertation for goals, and even those that do, need a way to consistently implement them.

“Anyone who tells you that people want to learn, they are pretty much wrong,” he said. “[Founders] We want to believe in the best of humanity and that people will devote time to wanting to learn something, but we always come back to the vitamin versus painkiller problem.” He argues that a big area in which this is most prominent is financing, leaving consumers where they need a platform Money helps them when they have a fever (overspending) rather than feeling ambitious (after a New Year’s resolution.).

Today, Hezarkhani is the CEO and founder of Parthean, an educational app and personal financial monitor that has just raised $1.1 million with a valuation of $12 million by investors including Litani Ventures, Gaingels, Amino Capital, Morning Brew’s Alex Lieberman, Republic Venture Partner Namrata Banerjee and others. . The startup also recently graduated from the Pear Accelerator, a program put together by the seed-stage venture firm that was founded in 2013.

Partean attempts to answer a question that is far more complex than simple productivity programs might do: How do they make consumers better financial citizens — even if they are largely unconcerned about the education it takes to get there? For Hazerkhani, along with his co-founders Nikhil Choudhary and Jason Zhu, the answer lies in the intersection of fintech and edtech.

edtech activation

Currently, Partean allows users to integrate their finances with the app, through Plaid, to show real-time financial health metrics. The data could help Parthian evolve into a platform that can provide financial advice to consumers when they need it most, such as budget tips after a spending weekend or investment advice after a big crypto moment. Format-wise, the Parthian modules are divided into modular, small-format videos that walk users through a complex video — with tests and a work item, such as putting money into a crypto wallet, at the end.

“This traditional learning model requires a very high level of activation energy on the part of the student; it requires from the student a willingness to learn [something] So badly that they’ll pay you, devote a team and stick with it.” Partean’s simple learning flow consists of a trigger, a recommendation, and an outcome. For example, a startup might notice that a user gets paid on the first of every month, resulting in activity Spending high for the first two weeks of the month, then trying to save as much as possible in the last week of the month.

“This excessive spending behavior highlights the user’s need to reform spending habits by designing a budget. In that final week, when the need is clear to the user, we recommend a five to 10 minute unit on budgeting,” the founder explained.

It’s a lofty goal – providing advice based on the user’s timing and spending habits – but one that personal finance desperately needs. In the meantime, though, Partean’s implementation appears in its early stages as an edtech platform rather than a predictive driver for fintech. At the moment, the app opens up to an introduction to the cryptography section, which Hizarkhani himself is studying.

Metrics and the market

Like many startups in the education sector, the success of Partean will depend on whether they can provide real results for users. Is success saving money after three months of using the service? Or have them master NFT in 30 days? The founder said he tracks completion rates, which currently rival group courses, and what he describes as “contact rates.” This means that part of Partean’s progress is measured by whether users, after completing a crypto course, will end up executing the action item placed at the end of the lesson, whether it’s setting up a crypto wallet on Coinbase or increasing a credit score. Going with the previous example, the goal would be for the user to tailor their budget to the app, and the Partean helps track spending from month to month.

“This is a metric that we can measure, while other education technology platforms are just a play on content,” he said.

Edtech and fintech have mixed in the past with NerdWallet, a recent public personal finance platform that offers product recommendations on top of the high-margin content business. But rather than promoting credit card recommendations and then making money on referral fees, Hirzarkhani believes that the subscription business model is more in line with consumers’ interests.

Hirzarkhani said that during the fundraising process, some investors argued that the best way to make money was by relying revenue on advertising or lead generation. Some even told the Parthean to become a bank. But he stuck to the idea that there should be a third party “a ubiquitous financial partner” who enjoyed the trust of consumers. In other words, he didn’t want to become another platform that recommends credit cards for referral money.

“If you look at the financial market, you have crypto, you have stock investing, you have traditional retirement accounts, you have credit cards, you have debit cards, you have rent — what we did is we said we wouldn’t have any column here,” he said. “We will only own the top tier. We want to own the user relationship with this market. It will merge, it will become more competitive, but we will always be here with this tier.”