---
title: 'Why a SoCal startup’s $105 million round could have positive ripples in the Portland startup community'
date: '2019-01-29T07:30:59-08:00'
type: post
word_count: 352
char_count: 2549
tokens: 458
categories:
  - News
  - Oregon
  - Portland
  - Startups
tags:
  - acorns
  - california
  - fintech
  - Funding
  - vault
---

# Why a SoCal startup’s $105 million round could have positive ripples in the Portland startup community

In case you haven’t noticed, Portland has more than its fair share of interesting regional offices — often established through acquisition. There are the obvious ones. Like AWS ([via Elemental](https://siliconflorist.com/2015/09/03/betting-4k-quintessential-portland-startup-elemental-acquired-amazon-web-services/)). And ebay ([via Critical Path](https://siliconflorist.com/2010/12/15/ebay-hits-buy-button-critical-path-joins-portland-mobile-development-scene/)). And Akamai ([via Janrain](https://siliconflorist.com/2019/01/07/portlands-janrain-has-been-acquired-by-akamai/)).

Today, I caught some news about one of those more recent acquisitions in the fintech space that may not immediately jump to mind. But all of that may soon be changing. Irvine-based [Acorns](https://www.acorns.com/), which has a Portland office through the [acquisition of Vault](https://siliconflorist.com/2017/11/07/acorns-now-and-acorns-later-portland-startup-vault-acquired-by-acorns/), just [raised a $105 million round](https://news.crunchbase.com/news/acorns-lands-its-expected-nine-figure-round/26/ "Acorns Lands Its Expected Nine-Figure Round").

> Acorns, it appears, want to be more than a savings app. By moving into the debit space, it feels more like a neo-bank with a savings focus than a nifty app to help people save their first few hundred dollars.
> 
> And that’s why its new round (the $105 million Series E) is interesting. With so much new capital, Acorns can afford to do quite a lot on the product front; I’m curious how far it will take the banking side of its service, and how much focus the savings element will receive.

Portland already has a small but vibrant fintech cluster, here in town. In addition to Acorns, we’ve got a variety of crypto activity and companies like [Bumped](https://bumped.com/), [Expensify](https://www.expensify.com/), [Mirador](https://www.miradortech.com/), [Nvoicepay](https://www.nvoicepay.com/), [Sila](https://silamoney.com/), and of course, [Simple](https://simple.com/), among others. Not to mention a bevy of folks who have spent time working in traditional banking.

With capital at its disposal and highly talented workforce, could Acorns be the new go-to name in Portland fintech? That remains to be seen. But it will be interesting to see where this goes.

For more information on the raise, see [Crunchbase News](https://news.crunchbase.com/news/acorns-lands-its-expected-nine-figure-round/26/).