August 2, 2023
/

2023 Mission Report (Q1-Q2)

Cleo empowers every person to build a life beyond a paycheck.
Here’s what we've been up to in 2023.

Two themes stand out from the last six months. One is the cost of living crisis which continues to affect our product decisions. We want everyone to have access to instant financial advice and financial products that put them first.

The other defining trend has been the explosion in generative AI.

After 6 years of building in the machine learning space, we’re the most excited we’ve ever been. We’re closer than ever to a world where AI assistants help us in every domain of life.

A world where Cleo empowers everyone to live beyond their next paycheck.

CLEO & THE FINANCIAL AI REVOLUTION

The world has finally woken up to the fact AI will be the next major computing modality. Humans will have meaningful trusted relationships with AIs. As the leading chat-first AI assistant, Cleo has been a critical player in helping Gen Z manage their money with just a quick text:

We’re experiencing an insane demand from Gen Z and Millennials to support them during this cost of living crisis with an 85% increase in unique conversations compared to the same time last year.

Cleo pioneered a new type of relationship between a user and AI through its fun and quirky tone of voice and brand. Cleo has “roasted” users nearly 300k times in the last year.

With the integration of GPT4 and other Large Language Models (LLMs), we expect Cleo's chat to generate over 10 million answers with human-like depth and context, bringing it closer to superhuman status.

CLEO DEMOCRATIZES MONEY COACHING

Cleo empowers Gen Z better than anyone else. By democratizing access to financial coaching and making it personalized to a user’s experience, we’re making what’s typically reserved for the top 1% of the population available to everyone.

Cleo has become the co-pilot for a user’s entire financial life by helping them create healthy money habits, making 71% of users more optimistic about their long-term financial future.

Illustration of a rocket

70% of users say that Cleo has improved their financial life, helping them stay on top of bills, save money, and control their overall spending.

Illustration that says '70% of users say Cleo improved their financial life'
BUSINESS UPDATE (FOR THE SUITS)

Since our last update in January, our business has continued to fly to new heights.

We are still growing. A lot. Not only is our subscriber base continuing to double year over year, we also grew revenue by +2x year on year and have now surpassed +$60M ARR.

We are continuing to optimize our gross margins by focusing on improving our efficiency across the entire business. We now have margins in line with some of the best companies in the world.

Illustration of flying money

Our user cohorts improved and accelerated every single month with a payback period for new users now <6 months.

Heart illustration

We’ve also kept our user acquisition costs low and stable by continuing to build a product that truly resonates with our deeply engaged audience. We’ve increased our organic acquisition to over +40% of new users every month.

We’re within striking distance of EBITDA profitability, a huge milestone for us in building a sustainable business that can serve our users.

Cleos EBITDA profitability

We're doing more with less. Our employee productivity has increased 1.5x year over year. We now have 185 team members across the US and Europe.

Cleo's employee productivity

As our business grows, we are looking for top talent in data science, machine learning, and AI research to help us to develop Cleo into a hyper-personalized financial coach. Visit our career page

LOVE FOR CLEO*

“The app talks to you like a bestie you’ve always needed. Services for budgeting, credit, advances, and more. Stop wasting your time on an app that doesn’t care about deflated pockets or how your day was…Download my bestie Cleo & you’ll see the difference.” - Mikey

“I really like Cleo - she will roast you if you get behind in payments but she'll also bless you if your money situation is good.”
-Brian

Cleo user quote
Cleo users five star review

“Cleo, the budgeting app with a comedic twist! It's like having a hilarious financial advisor in your pocket. Memes, GIFs, and witty one-liners keep you entertained while managing money.”
-Rowland

“Well done whoever made this! Never thought a budgeting app could be funny.” - Susan

LOOKING AHEAD

Generative AI for Cleo means a radically more intelligent chat at scale across different domains. The way we’re leveraging LLMs for natural language understanding and generation improves Cleo’s ability to converse, guide, and coach users at an increasingly superhuman level.

This is where our focus will be for the rest of the year, and we’re excited to share more ways to engage with Cleo soon.

    *Review provided by Customer to Cleo AI Ltd d/b/a Cleo. The comment above is related to individual experiences or results. Individual results may vary.

    Read more

    signing up takes
    2 minutes

    QR code to download cleo app
    Talking to Cleo and seeing a breakdown of your money.