VentureBeat

Updated with comments from chief executive Aaron Patzer

Mint, a free site that allows you to manage checking, savings and credit card accounts through an easy-to-use interface, will soon allow users to manage their investments, too.

There are plenty of investment-focused services out there, but Mint looks to be the first of the general personal finance sites to move beyond basic bank accounts and expenses into investment tracking.

The San Francisco startup says it will be compatible with 2,381 kinds of investment accounts. The company told us it plans to launch its new feature in private testing on May 6. In the meantime, TechCrunch has some early details worth pointing to.

Apparently, you’ll be able to manage brokerage, IRA, 401k and 529 accounts, but not mortgages or student loans (yet). It looks like the investment tools will be limited initially on helping you aggregate and navigate information from multiple accounts, but Mint plans to allow bill payments, stock trades and fund transfers in the future.

The focus seems a little more limited than other web investments companies we’ve covered, such as Cake Financial or Vestopia, which offer various kinds of social functionality. (Here’s a rundown of 11 such sites.) But by allowing users to manage even more of their financial life in one location, the new features should give Mint another leg up over competing personal finances sites like Wesabe, which don’t include your investments. That will be even truer once Mint moves beyond tracking, since it falls a little short if you still have to go elsewhere to pay your bills or make your trades.

Mint raised $12.1 million led by Benchmark Capital in March.

Updated: Patzer says the new features should help Mint expand beyond its core audience, which has been primarily users in their 20s who don’t have many long-term investments. Now, Mint can truly show you a complete picture of your net worth, including investments.

Patzer also clarified that adding data for more accounts (like student loans and mortgages) is the startup’s immediate priority. Enabling transactions such as bill payment is more of a long-term possibility.

Mint has set up a special site for VentureBeat readers to sign up for the private test here. The test itself won’t go live until May 6, but users can start signing up now.

Following yesterday’s announcement that free personal finance site Mint has raised $12.1 million — and rumors that a number of venture firms were trying to get in on the deal — I talked to Mint investor Bob Kagle about what makes the company stand out.

After all, it’s a crowded and growing field, as we noted in our coverage. Kagle confirms that there were “a fair amount” of VCs that were “very interested” in investing in Mint. The company’s going to win the online personal finance crown because it’s so easy to use, he says.

Kagle is a general partner at Benchmark Capital, which led this second round of financing, and he’s also joining Mint’s board of directors. He says Mint is the first personal finance aggregator that he’s used, because setting up an account anywhere else was just too complicated. You only need to enter your account numbers and passwords to get started on Mint. Kagle says he now manages 16 accounts on the site, and recently spotted and emptied an account that wasn’t earning any interest at all.

(When we first covered Mint, we agreed that it was fastest to set-up of all the personal finance sites, including competitor Wesabe. But usability isn’t everything, says Wesabe chief executive Marc Hedlund. In the past, Wesabe has touted its social network tools. Hedlund adds that by automating everything through online banking provider Yodlee, Mint is sacrificing the flexibility and security that Wesabe’s homegrown solution can offer.)

Mint has acquired more than 160,000 users since launching last September, and it now organizes $10 billion worth of transactions, according to Mint’s numbers.

Although the site is free, the company makes money from a section where users can compare different deals, such as credit card financing offers. Knowing as much as possible about your audience, and therefore getting the most bang for your buck, is something of a Holy Grail among online advertisers. And as a “nexus” of financial data, Mint is going have access to some of the most important and relevant information about its users, Kagle says.

At 27, Mint chief executive Aaron Patzer may seem a little on the young side, Kagle acknowledges. But he points out that Patzer is surrounded by experienced executive team, including Chief Marketing Officer Donna Wells (formerly of Expedia and Intuit) and Product Vice President Aaron Forth (formerly of eBay).

Mint, a web site that lets you see your financial activity from across your bank accounts (our coverage), has raised $12.1 million from Benchmark Capital and existing investors.

There are a host of competitors with solid offerings of their own, including Wesabe, Geezeo, Cashview and Buxfer. Mint claims it is five times larger than any of them.

Meanwhile, old-school competitors like Intuit have their own online personal finance management sites up in running — check out the online version of Quicken. Mint differentiates itself through patent-pending technology for such things as organizing transactions from multiple bank account, and a better user interface, founder and chief executive Aaron Patzer tells me.

The San Francisco company currently lets you aggregate your financial information from more than 1500 financial institutions. The average Mint user logs in twice a week, and also gets a weekly summary email of their financial activity, and a Mint survey of users shows that more than half have changed their behavior because of learning about their own behavior through the site, Patzer says — people are making smarter financial choices, such as eating out less and dining in more.

The company isn’t disclosing revenues, but it offers a part of its site that features competing credit card financing offers, for example, to help users save money. Patzer says that up to 15 percent of users click through on these ads.

Patzer also says that the company has a number of major announcements in the works, as well, including a big partnership and new features for viewing your investments, mortgages and loans from other financial sites.

Previous investors include Shasta Ventures, Sherpalo, Felicis Ventures, Hite Capital and First Round Capital. Mint raised $4.7 million last fall (our coverage)

updated
Mint, the San Francisco company that helps you manage money online, said it has raised $4.7 million in a first round of funding led by Shasta Ventures.

Investors include First Round Capital and Ram Shriram, early investor in Google.

We’ve written several times about this company since it launched last month, and received widespread praise. The company says it has since signed up 50,000 users.

Mint also added Donna Wells, formerly vice president of corporate marketing and acting CMO at Intuit, as chief marketing officer. That’s a solid addition, considering Mint is a competitor to Intuit. Wells was also a senior vice president of marketing at Expedia. Mint also named Aaron Forth, a former director of product at eBay, to vice president of product.

Update: Here’s what Ram Shriram tells us about his motivation for investing:

I invested in mint simply because I am excited about the market space [and] its remarkable value to users to manage their daily lives (and that this was my vision at Yodlee going back to my seed investment there in 1999). I also liked the UI, the founding team and their execution skills which were better than most startups I see. In a few years a majority of consumers will transact in this manner simply because they trust the site, it saves them time and they can both personalize the data and segment it so they know where their spend is going [and] where they are making money.

This just in: The winner of the Techcrunch40 event is Mint, the personal finance company (see our coverage here).

Meanwhile, below is the last batch of Techcrunch companies, from Tuesday’s afternoon session. After hitting VentureBeat readers with 40 start-ups over the past two days, we’re going to try our best fast on Web 2.0 for at least a day. Frankly, this latest batch wasn’t that impressive. Here’s the ranking: WooMe, Zivity, mEgo, Wixi, Xtr3D, Metaplace, Flowplay, Broadclip and Kaltura.

WooMe, speedating through live video online — We reviewed the company here. Lots of dating sites exist, but its pushing the envelope somewhat, and making dating extremely cheap. However, other big brands are likely to enter the market if it proves successful.

Zivity , adult network for model photography – This is the adult company VentureBeat first wrote about last month. It’s promise is to let models and photographers of the models get paid for their work, by making members pay a dollar for each vote they make on best models. Eight cents gets split between the model and photographer, and 20 cents goes to Zivity. You get five free votes, and then have to pay if you want more.

mEgo, a character-based user interface — Simply put, a mEgo is a cutesy avatar that can be posted on a social network and used as a content aggregator. Users build a unique character on the mEgo site, connect in other accounts that they want access through it — Flickr or Facebook, for instance — and then post it on their profiles around the internet. Anyone who clicks on the mEgo can then access content from all the sites it’s linked through to. The problem is that there’s a hundred other cross-platform aggregators already present or in the works, bringing the noise level in the space to a dull roar. And the question always remains the same: Why use one over another? With mEgo, at least, there’s an answer: It’s cute, and kitschy. The combination may be enough to win some hearts and minds, if only from the teenaged set.

Wixi — Simple concept: If you’ve got content on your computer that you want to share with someone, but you don’t want to go to the trouble of file transfers, you can drag and drop the files from your desktop to your Wixi site. Whether it’s music, movies or some other sort of content, your friends can then go and enjoy it through the Wixi Universal Flash Player. This brings up some questions on copyright: How long will it be until people use their sites to share their copy of, say, the newest Disney movie? And will it be different enough from competitors like Pando, Docstoc and others, for it to get above the noise? The company is based in France.

Xtr3D, a lot of hand-waving — No, really, it is. Xtr3D is a 3D human-machine interface, which is a fancy way of saying that you can move things on your screen by making specific gestures with your hands. The Nintendo Wii does this with a long motion-sensitive paddle that you move around. Xtr3D, instead, tracks your movements through a camera mounted on the computer screen. During the presentation, the company’s founder used the program to manipulate a Google Earth map, rotating and zooming in and out. While the demonstration was interesting, the program didn’t seem to be as fast at responding to the gestures as it would be to mouse clicks. Additionally, his gestures obviously had to be very clear and slow enough for the computer to recognize. Without taking away from the accomplishment of the company, it seems obvious that the software isn’t mature; we’ll have to wait a bit longer, it seems for a Minority Report-style computer. In fact, it reminds us of a near-identical company, Softkinetic, which we wrote about a year ago, and which we haven’t heard much about since. Xtr3D couldn’t tell us clearly how it was different from Softkinetic (Update: This appears to be our misunderstanding. The company has since explained that Xtr3D uses only software and a single camera, while Softkinetic requires infrared as well. Xtr3D argues this makes it less expensive.) The company is positioning the software as a platform for developers, with an emphasis on gaming.

Metaplace, an open standards virtual world, that lets users mashup games and other activities — It’s a small download, 30k. We reviewed it separately here. Again, it enters a very crowded field, and questions remain about business model.

Flowplay , yet another avatar virtual world – This site lets you build a 3D avatar, and do familiar things such as play games and win points so that you can build out your wardrobe. It renders in Flash. It wants to build a large number of settings for avatars (apartments, lounges), like Doppelganger’s vSide (our coverage), except no downloading. You can connect and chat with friends. The site looks clean, however, we’ve been there, done that. There are way too many avatar-game sites now, and this one doesn’t break the “originality” threshold. We don’t see much here to stop people going to MSN or Miniclip to play games. Flowplay has raised $500K on a bridge note from Ambient Sound Investments.

Broadclip, a system for sharing music online — The presentation consisted of someone coming on stage, saying hello, and turning on a video for everyone to watch. All of which might have been fine, had the presentation been good, or particularly informative. Broadclip’s “MediaCatcher” software aggregates music for its users through a recommendation engine. Once found, the music can be played anytime. MediaCatcher works independently, on a mobile device or through platforms like Facebook. Despite some attractive features, the company didn’t seem unique or impressive; perhaps it was the grandiose claim of being the “Web 3.0″ solution for music. Napoleon complex, anyone?

Kaltura, letting you collaborate with video – This is an also-ran. This company’s slogan is “YouTube meets the Wiki.” Instead of sharing text, you’re sharing video. Take an example of a music band. The band can go to Kaltura, create a Web site, record an introduction video, and then others can upload their own content, and then mix it all up in a big video mashup. We’ve seen scores of iterations of this, and the only thing surprising about Kaltura is that it has 20 employees working for it, and has $2 million in venture backing from Avalon Partners. It is based in Tel Aviv and Manhattan.

(This post was co-written with Chris Morrison.)

[Update: Mint has won the TechCrunch 40 conference's competition, which goes to the most impressive presenting company from among the 40 participants. Mint will receive a $50,000 cash award and other services and awards from corporate sponsors.]

Mint, a long-awaited online tool for managing your personal finances, has launched today.

For those who have used Quicken or other traditional personal accounting software to manage your checking, savings and credit card accounts, Mint will be a relief.

Once you sign up, you provide Mint with access to all of your accounts. Mint automatically categorizes each paycheck and each expenditure, then provides visual graphs and pie charts showing exactly how you’re spending your money. The entire process takes a matter of minutes.

Other software typically requires you to manually enter line items — a process that can take hours. Even Wesabe (past coverage), another online personal finance tool, requires you to download software to help it sync your bank account information with its online service.

For first-time Mint users, the user experience is as if a veil is being lifted from your eyes, exposing how you’re wasting money on food, gas, clothes, movies, and any number of other items.

Mint continues updating while its users are offline, connecting to their bank accounts every night, securely downloading transaction data, updating accounts and making note of unusual activity or low balances. It also searches out better deals to help save money — for example, credit cards offering lower fees than your current ones.

You can choose to let Mint send you email and text message reminders about bills, and updates about your own spending activity; the site also works from your mobile phone.

I caught up Aaron Patzer, the founder and chief executive, at an event last week. He spent the first six months working on Mint by himself in his bedroom, he told me, building the technology that searches and categorizes your financial data from across institutions.

During Mint’s beta period, the company says users have found ways to save an average of $1,000.

Upon testing the software last week, I immediately changed a number of personal spending habits, and feel even guiltier about some others. It also gave me even clearer proof that Bank of America has done a great job of nickle-and-diming me at every turn.

This tool should have mass appeal, especially considering the large amounts of money Americans have been borrowing in recent years — provided people are willing to entrust Mint with their personal data.

Wesabe, a Web site that lets people manage their finances, and network with network with others for advice, has raised $4 million in a first round of financing.

We first wrote about the Berkeley, Calif. company in November.

The financing was led by Union Square Ventures, of New York, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, of San Francisco, which provided the company with seed money. Its advantage over incumbent services such as Quicken is that it is online and offers its service is free.

However, the company has plenty of competition offering similar services including online services from mainstream banks. It is unclear how many people are entrusting their finances with Wesabe. The company says it has had “tens of thousands” of people register, and that between 60 and 70 percent of the people have returned to the site at least once after registering.

Competitor Buxfer launched a couple of months earlier, and offers more compelling visual graphics, such as pie charts, while offering similar other basic features such as importing expense transactions and providing ways to tag them. With Buxfer, you can add also your transactions via SMS. It does have some group features, such as ways to split expenses with roommates. There’s also Mint, which still hasn’t launched, but has generated buzz since getting backed by First Round Capital.

Wesabe’s Marc Hedlund tells VentureBeat Wesabe’s primary advantage is the extensiveness of its social networks: It lets people share tips about places they visited while dining, and things such as bank fees and debt levels — which provide ways for people to make better financial decisions, Hedlund said. The company has recently offered a Flash-based bar graph comparing expense categories.