Cleo at $150M ARR

Jan-Erik Asplund

Published Nov 14th, 2024

TL;DR: While other personal finance chatbots from the 2015-6 messaging boom pivoted, Cleo doubled down on AI chat. Now, Sacra estimates that Cleo is at $150M annualized recurring revenue (ARR), up 97% YoY, with LLMs more than 2x’ing their engagement and 3x’ing their revenue from upselling high-margin financial products. For more, check out our full Cleo report and dataset on Cleo’s gross margin, profitability, revenue mix, and more.

Key points via Sacra AI:

Circa the 2015-6 messaging boom, Cleo (2016), along with fellow London startups Plum (2016) and Chip (2017), launched a millennial-centric Facebook Messenger chatbot that delivered individualized personal finance content—answering questions like “how much did I spend at Tesco’s last month?”—through integrating your bank accounts via Plaid. While Plum ($8.6M revenue in 2023) and Chip ($20.7M revenue in 2023) shifted to a Stash/Acorns-like model of automating savings and investments and monetizing on assets under management (AUM), Cleo stayed focused in on chat, monetizing through subscription ($5.99 to $14.99 per month) that unlocks credit coaching, savings goals, and custom spending challenges and via fees on same-day cash advances ($3.99 to $9.99 per advance).
In 2019, Cleo pivoted from the UK to the United States, launched a mobile app, and shifted their core demographic to Gen Z after noticing higher engagement from younger users—with Sacra estimating that Cleo hit $150M ARR in October 2024, up 97% YoY (59% of revenue from subscriptions and 41% from fees) with 700,000 paying customers and 7 million total users for ~$214 average revenue per customer (ARPC). Compare to the cash advance-focused US neobank Dave (NASDAQ: DAVE) at $259M in trailing twelve months revenue, up 27% YoY, with 11M customers for $24 ARPC, the financial content affiliate engine NerdWallet (NYSE: NRDS) at $599M in 2023 revenue, growing 11% YoY, and student loan refinancer-turned-neobank SoFi (NYSE: SOFI) at $2.1B revenue in 2023, growing 36% YoY.
After the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, Cleo integrated OpenAI’s GPT-* models into its core chat interface, driving increased engagement with their chatbot (85% YoY growth in unique conversations in 2023) and higher velocity of upsells to their cash advance and credit builder products (transactional revenue grew 183% YoY in 2023 vs. 93% YoY growth for subscriptions). Riding the LLM wave pushed Cleo’s gross margins from 34% in 2022 to 57% in 2023 as 1) revenue shifted towards high-margin financial products, and 2) as integrating support docs into their LLM allowed Cleo to increase support headcount by only 20% even as revenue grew 121%.

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