Maroo - Pay for your wedding in installments
"Buy Now, Pay Later" payment solution for $95B US wedding market
I discover a new startup every week and share it with you. This week’s featured startup is Maroo. Subscribe to get each and every issue.
What it does: Maroo is a wedding fintech startup that helps couples to avoid high-interest credit cards and personal loans for their weddings. Couples can break their wedding expenses in up to 24 months with 0% APR and wedding professionals/vendors get paid within 1 business day.
How it started: Alexey Nikityuk (CEO), Andrei Riaskov (Head of Engineering) and Anja Winikka (CMO) built Maroo because they believe that there is a better way for couples to start their married life rather than going into a pile of credit debt. They realized that with 2.1m weddings in the US every year and an average all-in wedding cost of $40,000, 74% of couples go into debt in order to pay for their
wedding expenses.
And with an average APR of 15-35% for typical personal loan or corporate card rates they saw a big opportunity to offer easier payment solutions with lower rates.
Traction: Maroo has already helped a dozen couples to have the wedding they had in mind without overwhelming their bank accounts. They have raised $3.8M in their Pre-Seed & Seed round.
How it works: Maroo offers free 12 free coaching sessions with Certified Financial Planners to help couples helping them to start their married life on a right foot, understand various tax implications of being a new family, what joint accounts are and how to operate with them, how to buy houses. Once they establish their credit limit, couples can choose installment plans up to 24 months and pay it back over time with 0% APR. It also includes embedded event cancellation insurance in case of unfortunate cancellations.
Open jobs:
Why it’s interesting: The $95B US wedding market is a huge opportunity ripe for disruption. Any fintech solution that can make these enormous expenses easier to stomach (with a lower interest rate) is bound to capture the interest of many couples. What makes Maroo so interesting is that the transactions are huge, the benefits compared to comparable financial solutions are objectively superior, and there are millions of weddings each year (although the overall marriage rate is on the decline).
