Birdwingo is a New York and Prague-based fintech company that wants young people to invest for their future. 

It asks the question: 

“With an average starting salary of €23,500/year and house prices in cities across Western Europe soaring to an average of €305,000, is society sufficiently guiding the youth in their financial journeys?”

The answer is no.

The company aims to get young Europeans aged 11-17 to learn to invest and is launching the first investing app designed specifically for young Europeans. Today  the startup raised  €1.2 million investment. 

Birdwingo’s app is a first-of-its-kind platform in the EU that allows underage teenagers to invest. It offers access to popular stocks and ETFs, including Apple, Nvidia, and the S&P 500, among over 12,000 additional options. 

To teach teens how to work with these assets, Birdwingo created a “Duolingo for finance” academy. It is designed to capture the imagination of current teens by resembling formats of Duolingo, Instagram and TikTok rather than a corporate finance textbook. 

According to Adam Hano, Birdwingo’s co-founder:

“Birdwingo addresses the gap in financial education, which is not adequately covered by schools, and is often left to questionable financial influencers or scammers online.

We step in to enable teenagers to actively invest under full parental supervision, combining high-quality theoretical knowledge with real-world practice”, adds A New Era for the next generation of investors in Europe.”

Designed with the safety and education of young investors in mind, Birdwingo provides a fully controlled environment where parents can set investment restrictions, manually or automatically approve trades, and contribute to their children’s financial future through regular account deposits. They can also track their children’s learning progress and even learn a thing or two themselves, enhancing their own financial knowledge.

The platform also plans to partner with high schools and non-profits to broaden its reach and impact. 

Today’s funding comes from New York-based VC fund Bienville Capital, other company founders, and bank executives.

Lead image: Adam Hano and Andrej Hano, Birdwingo. Photo: uncredited.