Crowded’s app gives clubs, associations banking flexibility

Crowded closed on $6 million to develop its suite of banking and member management tools.

Fraternity, sororities and on-campus clubs are required to bank through their student activities, but without many of the features of modern banking.

The company designed its mobile app for the specific needs of club treasurers so they can perform duties, for example, requesting and collecting member dues and tax reporting, digitally.

The company is entering a crowded space. Heylo raised over a million dollars in seed funding for its member coordination app, while OurHouse and OmegaFi only target frats and sororities.

Organizations can link their own bank accounts with Crowded's physical and virtual cards. Crowded collects interchange fees from merchants when debit cards are used to make purchases instead of charging subscription fees. The processing fees for member payments are lower than the industry average of 8%.

Crowded co-founding members, from left, Dvir Hanum, Daniel Grunstein and Darryl Gecelter. The image is Crowded.

The company was founded in June of 2021. They were both in financial technology and alumni network tech. Previously, he worked with JP Morgan Chase.

He was trying to advocate for traction within the bank. I realized that this is a way to solve some of the headaches I had and went top-down within the organization.

Crowded has grown into 300 chapter customers using the platform, with letters of intent signed with another 1,200 chapters.

A group of former bank executives, as well as Deel co- founder Philippe Bouaziz, were in the seed round.

Building out the platform, marketing and compliance will be funded by the new funding. Grunstein wants to open the platform up and build out features, such as automation from the customer side. The company was on its way to $1 million a year in recurring revenue.

He said that the build of features would allow customers to do things at a regular bank. Adding a self-service component is one of the things we want to do. If we can meet those goals, we will do a Series A.