#StartupsEverywhere Profile: Ari Carter, Co-Founder and CEO, Cloche Invest
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Helping Millennial Women Grow Their Wealth
Chicago has the highest concentration of female-led startups in the United States, with more than one-third of the city’s startups run by women. One of these successful women-run businesses is Cloche Invest, a recently launched investment platform focused on helping millennial women grow their wealth. Ari Carter, the Co-Founder and Chief Financial Officer of Cloche Invest, saw that current investment platforms were not adequately catering to the needs of young women. Together with her Co-Founder, Peyton Pritikin, Ari is focused on creating a new generation of financially independent women.
Can you tell us a little about yourself? What is your background?
I’m the Co-Founder and CFO of Cloche Invest. Prior to that, I worked at Airbnb for almost 3 years in their public policy department in Chicago. I’m also currently an MBA candidate at DePaul University concentrating in finance.
My co-founder, Peyton Pritikin, and I have known each other for over 20 years, and we started Cloche in February after we had a couple of conversations about how dissatisfied we were with the current investment options that were available to us.
Tell us more about Cloche. What is the work you’re doing, and how does your platform work?
We’re an online investment and high-yield savings platform catered to the needs of millennial women. We offer goal-based plans that help our users save for the things that are important to them at this stage in their lives. Our purpose is to empower young women to take control of their finances and feel confident in the choices that they’re making. Whether it’s saving for a wedding, or graduate school, or starting to plan for a family, we offer curated options to help them invest smartly and achieve their goals.
We go beyond a typical robo-advising or savings platform. We offer educational and informative content that makes wealth management and investing digestible and relatable. We also address common questions, concerns, and wants that our users have. We provide curated content around the goal each user is saving for, giving her tools to help plan as she continues to save. By integrating education and lifestyle into wealth management, we believe we’re connecting with this demographic in a way they haven’t previously experienced.
I know you’re focused on helping women manage their wealth. Why did you choose this focus, and why is it so important to help women better invest their money?
Looking at the options that are on the market today, we realized that they just aren’t connecting with millennial women. An S&P Global study came out recently that found that only 26 percent of women are currently investing. Women, on average, begin investing later in life than men, but we also tend to outlive them.
My co-founder and I are both millennial women, and we experienced many of the same pain points that are common to our demographic when looking at investing. We wanted to create a platform that listens to the concerns of young women, and takes them into account when we create their financial plan. So we believe that by changing the way women manage their wealth when they’re young, it will further benefit them later in life.
What makes Chicago’s startup ecosystem so unique?
Chicago really is one of the best cities to be in if you’re a female entrepreneur. There’s a lot of support within the community, and access to a number of organizations that work to promote women within this space. We’re currently in the tenth cohort of the WiSTEM program, which is run out of 1871. It’s a 12-week program that addresses a lot of the challenges and opportunities that we face as women entrepreneurs, and it helps connect us with funding and resources and other women in the space. We’re about halfway through the program, and it’s been a really great experience. We’re excited to be a part of this community of 120 female-founded companies that have already gone through this accelerator. Chicago really is a good place for women in the entrepreneurial space.
Chicago also has a lot of really amazing universities, and they’re all really great in fostering and promoting entrepreneurial growth. We’ve benefited directly from the work that DePaul’s Coleman Entrepreneurship Center does. They offer a wide array of resources and opportunities, and they were really instrumental in our early growth as a company.
What issues are Chicago entrepreneurs dealing with that should receive more attention from state and federal policymakers?
One of the things that I think is shaping Chicago’s startup ecosystem is the rise in support for female- and minority-founded startups. 1871 is a great example of that. They do a lot of work on diversity and inclusion in their incubator space. As a woman of color, I’ve experienced how discouraging it can be when you see that the majority of funding and resources go to entrepreneurs that don’t look like yourself.
I think Chicago has made a lot of strides in addressing these unique challenges that women and minorities face when we’re building businesses from the ground up. There’s always more that can be done, but I think Chicago is making significant progress when it comes to diversity and inclusion.
What is your goal for Cloche Invest moving forward?
What’s most important for us is to see a change in the way that young women interact with and approach their personal finances. We created this platform to not just gives users the tools they need to start investing, but the confidence to take control of their financial well-being. We’re excited to see Cloche continue to grow and have a positive impact on women across the country. We hope to be a catalyst behind a new generation of financially independent women.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
Engine works to ensure that policymakers look for insight from the startup ecosystem when they are considering programs and legislation that affect entrepreneurs. Together, our voice is louder and more effective. Many of our lawmakers do not have first-hand experience with the country's thriving startup ecosystem, so it’s our job to amplify that perspective. To nominate a person, company, or organization to be featured in our #StartupsEverywhere series, email edward@engine.is.
