riseup's financial revolution

maybe not the sexiest company, but right and sustainable.

In June, I wrote about how riseup became the first Israeli fintech to partner with an Israeli municipality. It was an unprecedented private-public collaboration that brought financial literacy and cash flow management to the citizens of Bat Yam, one of Israel’s poorest cities.

By empowering citizens to manage their cash flow, save and invest, riseup is shifting the consumer finance paradigm. And people are talking about it. Just this week, national TV channels started playing a new commercial for riseup featuring Israeli talk-show host Erez Tal. Even Sivan Rahav Meir did a segment on it. I saw by accident as I was waiting for my stuffed bourkas on Frishman St. last night.

The founders—Yuval Samet, Tamara Harel Cohen, and Iftach Bar—have a unique story. In 2017, Yuval left his job at Klarna to return to Israel and start a company that would create social good. He grew up in a modest home in Petach Tikvah, and often speaks about how his parents always emphasized financial education.

Tamara Harel-Cohen, who had made aliyah from the UK, solicited the nascent startup’s first customers—Israeli single mothers—by going door-to-door, even without much Hebrew.

Iftach Bar is a brilliant engineer and now the company’s CTO. Iftach earned his bachelors degree in high school, served in an elite military unit within 8200, and founded what is today the Israeli Cyber Olympics—a country-wide competition that teachers kids how to code.  

To offer some context, riseup is solving an urgent issue. Education in financial literacy is atrocious across the Western world, but especially in Israel, where more than 25% of households lived in perpetual overdraft as of 2019. 42% of households were in overdraft for at least one month during the year. These numbers are astronomical. To be sure, part of this results from Israel having the prices of Manhattan and salaries of Detriot. Yes, Tel Aviv was recently named the world’s most expensive city, and real estate prices and house down-payment requirements don’t seem to be relenting anytime soon. But there’s also a cultural-behavioral element. Israelis are often known to spend impulsively and not plan in advance.

How we can alter that thinking? Simplifying the data, says riseup. By aggregating all of a person’s financial accounts into one number called “discretionary spending left in the month,” riseup makes a person’s financial life easy and accessible for a small fee each month. It’s a refreshing antidote to our hectic world of bureaucratic sludge.

This is all cool, and the placing of principles at the core of a company’s business model is a topic I want to further explore over the coming months. But there’s something else unique about riseup—their target market is exclusively Israel.

It was Tal Kreisler, the CEO of NoTraffic, who once told me the Hebrew phrase which translates to, “It is always the cobbler that goes shoeless”—which is the kind-of paradox that Israel is home to so many tech companies exporting their solutions abroad, where at the same time, the local population too often doesn’t get to benefit from such advancements. Granted, the Israeli market of 9 million isn’t really a market. It makes sense. And yet, there’s something beautiful about riseup taking responsibility for its own people before potentially expanding overseas.

Recently the company has also started saving initiatives for people to start building wealth. Thousands of Israelis are already benefitting from riseup, much of which can be seen in the super supportive Facebook community they’ve built, called “To be on this together, with riseup” (Hebrew).

The startup’s service might sound similar to competitors, but its technological algorithms and business model alignment make it unique. Thus an example of how empowerment leads to prosperity, another theme I want to explore.