At 20-years-old, Jessica Mah is already something of a budding serial entrepreneur.
She launched her first startup at 13, graduated from high school at 15, debuted InternshipIN in 2008 and most recently founded inDinero, a financial management site that promises to be the Mint for small businesses.
With that kind of resume, it’s no wonder that Mah has been seen as a teen to watch for quite some time, but with her latest venture, inDinero, she’s finally making a legitimate play for the big leagues.
Y-Combinator backed inDinero is generating notable buzz and respectable cash. Earlier this month, the company (which helps small businesses track and manage their expenses in real-time) wrapped up a $1.2 million angel round with several high-profile investors, including Yelp’s Jeremy Stoppelman, 500 Startup’s Dave McClure, Microsoft’s Fritz Lanman,
Intuit’s David Wu, Slide’s Keith Rabois, and YouTube’s Jawed Karim. The final collection of 20 angel investors was no accident:”We had a few rules for who we wanted to let into our round, the first prerequisite was that they had run a business before, not all of them had but most of them had,” she says, “I thought that was really important because we’re building a product for businesses so if they get it, they can probably help us out more.”
According to Mah, the round was oversubscribed and inDinero could have easily raised $2 million, if necessary.
Recently Mah dropped by TechCrunch TV to discuss the funding round and how her business, which she co-founded with Andy Su, is and is not like TC40’s Mint (which was sold to Intuit for $170 M back in 2009).
While Mah welcomes the comparison— she has even talked to Mint’s management for advice—- she doesn’t see a similar fate for inDinero: “I don’t think we’re bribe-able at this point, because we just want to build a real business…5, 10, 20 year timeline. The entire money space is not just ripe for disruption but there are so many things that need to be done. If you run a business and you start tallying up all the different problems you have to solve, its just an infinite list, like taxes, payroll, sending money, receiving money, dealing with predators, the list goes on. Until someone can easily solve them all and in an easy way, then we’re not done with our job. And I don’t think we can do that in 5-10 years, this is a 20-30 year company that we want to build”
See full video above.