Company: Belong

Founders: Avion Gray / Samantha Rosenberg

Headquarters: London

Most Recent Valuation: Undisclosed

Employees: 6

Founded: 2022

In One Sentence: “Belong is a wealth platform that helps young people stop sitting on cash and start building long-term wealth - with a world-first product that lets them responsibly double their investment from day one..”

Top quote: “Almost half our customers are first-time investors. That metric matters most to us; we’re not competing for existing investors. We’re creating new ones.”

Who are you building your product/service for, and what painful problem are you taking away from their day?

Our customer is a 20-30-something professional - good job, good salary, vaguely aware they should be doing more with their money, but somehow never quite getting round to it. The problem isn't access or knowledge. It's behaviour. Present bias, choice overload, and a financial industry that speaks in alienating language have left a generation of capable, literate people sitting on excess cash, waiting for a "perfect moment" that never comes. They feel overlooked and misunderstood, and they're right. The industry built products for people who already invest. We're building for everyone else.

If a top-tier VC is reading this, what would you want them to understand about your company in 30 seconds?

A generation that wants to invest, knows it should invest, and still doesn't. That's a problem worth hundreds of billions, and nobody has cracked it. Belong is built from the ground up to change behaviour, not just reduce friction, and our world-first product lets customers responsibly double their investment from day one to make the most of compounding returns over time. Close to 100% retention, 100% on-time loan repayments, and nearly half our customers are first-time investors. We're growing the market, not recycling it. Backed by leaders from Wise, Nutmeg, and ClearScore.

What are you doing differently than your competitors?

Because doing it properly is genuinely hard, and the people building investing products never felt the problem themselves. So the industry defaulted to competing on fees, ignored the behavioural reality of how people make financial decisions, and left a generation stuck between knowing and actually doing.

Our standout feature, the Boost loan - a mortgage-like structure that lets customers responsibly double a long-term investment from day one - is the only product of its kind globally. Getting it to market required the macro environment and infrastructure to catch up to make it viable to merge an investing and a lending offering into one seamless customer experience.

Finally, it required a rare combination of skills: a leveraged finance banker who could engineer the product architecture, a behavioural economist who understood why people don't invest, and the conviction to pursue it when conventional wisdom said it couldn't be done.

How did you meet, and why have you partnered with each other on this business?

Avion is a former leveraged finance banker who went on to scale a US fintech to $1.5B ARR across 6 markets; Samantha is a published behavioural economist with deep expertise in financial decision-making.

We were introduced by the late Nick Hungerford, founder of Nutmeg - Europe's first robo-advisor. Nick had been speaking to us both separately and noticed we were describing the same problem in different languages, one through the lens of behavioural science, one through the lens of the financial system and the products within it. So he put us together.

What emerged was a strong, shared conviction that cracking this problem required exactly what we had between us - a deep understanding of human behaviour and the expertise to build genuinely innovative financial products around it. The rest is history.

What was the “this has to exist” moment that made you start the company?

It started when we realised we were both guilty of the same thing: smart, financially literate, yet sitting on excess cash instead of investing. We weren't alone. Despite unprecedented access to investing, millions of young professionals with good jobs and disposable income are still sitting on the sidelines. That was the moment - the gap wasn't access or knowledge, it was behaviour. And there was nothing in the market effectively addressing it.

How do you make money? Which part of your business model are you most excited about scaling?

Revenue comes from three sources today: an annual AUM management fee, a monthly platform subscription, and a one-time arrangement fee on every Boost loan.

What excites us most is the Boost loan flywheel - every customer who takes one grows the AUM we manage, deepens their commitment to long-term investing and, over time, as loan volume scales, drives down our cost of capital. That means we can offer a cheaper Boost to customers while building margin on the lending side.

The more we grow, the better it gets for everyone.

Which proof points matter most right now?

Three metrics define where we are right now:

1. Near-perfect retention - people aren't just signing up, they're staying and building;
2. A multi-million-pound waitlist for the Boost loan - demand is real and compounding;
3. Almost half our customers are first-time investors.

That last one matters most to us: we're not competing for existing investors. We're creating new ones.

How does your product/service make the world a better place?

For generations, the tools that build serious wealth - leverage, compounding, early market exposure - have been accessible only to the wealthy. The rest were left with products that were uninspiring and mostly built for people who already invested. Nobody built anything compelling or innovative enough to drive a movement from saving into investing.

Belong exists to change that.

Almost half our customers are first-time investors - people who didn't invest before and now do. And with the Boost loan, we're putting a mechanism long reserved for the wealthy into the hands of everyone else. That's what makes the world better: products that are not just faster or cheaper, but fairer.

What’s been your biggest unexpected challenge so far, and what did it force you to learn quickly?

Innovating in a space that isn't used to it. Financial services has a long memory for what's gone wrong, which means genuinely new ideas, like the Boost loan, require you to bring everyone on the journey with you: regulators, lenders, customers. Each group needs a different kind of confidence built from scratch.

What it taught us is that you can't shortcut trust, and it doesn't happen by chance. You have to earn it at every layer, from the regulatory framework to the product architecture to each micro engagement with customers.

What does success look like in 12 months? What about in 5 years?

In 12 months: 50x growth - thousands of new investors on the platform, the Boost loan waitlist cleared and scaling, and Belong a recognised name in the conversation about how this generation builds wealth.

In 5 years: Belong has become the default wealth platform for a generation, operating across multiple markets, with the Boost loan established as a mainstream financial product, and millions of people building long-term wealth who wouldn't have started without us.

What type of partner or collaborator would most accelerate your journey right now? (If relevant, which roles are you hiring for?)

We're actively building out our lending and distribution partnerships, and we're being deliberate about who we bring in. On the lending side, we're looking for financial institutions who want to be part of something that's going to scale. On distribution, partners who can put Belong in front of people at the moment they're most open to thinking about their financial future.

And we're always open to talking to investors who know the space and want to back a category-defining consumer fintech.

Finish this sentence: “We’ll know we’ve really made it when…

…we overhear a group of strangers at the pub discussing their Boost loans.”

Website: be-long.co

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