Sonny Mo

The list of finalists for the 2019 Brown Venture Prize published by Brown UniversityBrown UniversityBrown University is a private nonprofit research university in Providence, Rhode Island, and a member of the Ivy League. Chartered by Rhode Island's colonial legislature in 1764, it is known for its undergraduate Open Curriculum, which has no common required core. Christina H. Paxson, president since July 2012, announced on August 3, 2026, that the 2026–27 academic year would be her last in office. As of October 1, 2026, the search for Brown's 20th president remained underway.Open the full entry’s Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship includes a team called Cress Health, whose members were Justin M. Kim (class of 2021, Computer Science and Biology), Sonny Mo (class of 2021, Computer Science and Philosophy) and Michael W. Lai (class of 2021, Hofstra University BS/MD program, Biochemistry). The list introduces Cress Health with the line that everyone deserves support on the path to recovery and states that it uses mobile technology to fight addiction.⁠[1]

The Nelson Center’s page on Bloom gives his name as “Sonny Mo '21” and notes next to it that he was a 2019 Brown Venture Prize Finalist.⁠[2]

An article in Benzinga states that Bloom was founded in 2020 by him, Sam Yang and Allan Maman and describes it as a Y Combinator-backed fintech company that lets teenagers invest; Daily Dropout’s profile of February 21, 2023 also gives 2020 as the year Bloom was founded. Y Combinator’s company page gives the founding year as 2021.⁠[3][4][5]

An article by Breck Dumas published by Fox Business on July 16, 2022 states that Bloom’s three co-founders, Sonny Mo, Allan Maman and Sam Yang, wanted to create something user-friendly and youth-focused, and that he had tried to help his brother set up a traditional investment account and was struck by how confusing and overcomplicated the process was for teenagers. The article also credits Allan Maman with making fidget spinners go viral in high school. The caption of the article’s photo names the Bloom co-founders, from left to right, as Allan Maman, Sam Yang and Sonny Mo.⁠[6]

The Nelson Center page on Bloom at Brown University lists its founders as Sonny Mo, Allan Maman and Sam Yang and tags Bloom “AAPI Founder”. Two other sources list the founders differently: an article by Christine Hall published by TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry on July 31, 2023 states that Bloom was founded by Allan Maman and Sam Yang and does not mention him, and Y Combinator’s company page lists only Sam Yang in its founders section.⁠[2][7][5]

Y Combinator’s company page lists Bloom in the Winter 2021 batch, with the tagline “Investing app that teaches you how to invest.” The Nelson Center page states that Bloom was part of Y Combinator in 2021. TechCrunch’s 2023 article states that it was Sam Yang who took Bloom through Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 batch and that he had earlier built an AI-based photo app with more than 250,000 users.⁠[5][2][7]

TechCrunch’s 2023 article states that Bloom launched in February 2022. The Fox Business article of July 16, 2022 describes Bloom as another free investing app created specifically for teens and states that it had shot to the top of the charts only a handful of months after launching.⁠[7][6]

The Benzinga article states that teenagers can invest in fractional shares of stocks and ETFs through SIPC-insured standard custodial accounts, and that education modules and gifting features keep younger users engaged; parents can disable trading in high-risk stocks such as GameStop and AMC, and parental controls let parents intervene and approve trades before they are filled. The article states that Bloom presents itself as more educational than trading apps such as RobinhoodRobinhoodRobinhood is a financial services brand co-founded in 2013 by Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt; its publicly listed parent company is Robinhood Markets, Inc., headquartered in Menlo Park, California, United States. The company has grown from commission-free mobile securities trading into crypto assets, retirement accounts, and other financial services, and trades on Nasdaq under the symbol HOOD.Open the full entry, with lessons that teach children what long-term investing and diversification are. The article states that the company runs a Discord server with more than 2,000 people, which it uses to get feedback from its community and fix problems, and had secured $3.3 million in seed funds to date; it gives the age of co-founder Allan Maman as 22 and records his remark that people under 18 could not get involved in the markets during the pandemic, which Bloom aims to change. The article states that Bloom planned to exit beta and add users, update its educational content, and add points or cash-back offers redeemable at partner companies such as StarbucksStarbucksStarbucks is a publicly traded coffee company headquartered in Seattle, founded in 1971 by Jerry Baldwin, Gordon Bowker and Zev Siegl. Howard Schultz subsequently developed its coffeehouse model and international expansion. It operates company-owned and licensed coffeehouses and sells packaged coffee through partners. Its shares trade on Nasdaq under SBUX.Open the full entry.⁠[3]

The Nelson Center page on Bloom at Brown University states that Bloom teaches teenagers to invest through educational modules, that its features include parental safeguards and bank-grade encryption, that it offers UTMA/UGMA custodial brokerage accounts, and that it works with nonprofits and student-led organizations to spread financial literacy. The page states that Bloom had recently raised $4.3 million, including from a 2020 U.S.United StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry presidential candidate, that as of April 2022 the app’s waitlist had more than 35,000 teenagers, and that it had more than 200,000 current users; it adds that Bloom had recently been covered by Fast Company and Forbes.⁠[2]

The Fox Business article of July 16, 2022 records Allan Maman’s view that there is a big issue with financial literacy and that children either are not getting the right education or are not talking about money at home, because in many households money is “kind of like a taboo topic”; he says that traditional financial literacy lessons can be drawn-out and boring, whereas that teenagers can begin investing with as little as $1 and that Bloom has many education modules and has developed dozens of “bite-sized” lessons. The article states that Bloom offers parental controls to minimize risk and that some parents limit their children to exchange-traded funds rather than individual stocks; Bloom had also partnered with the online learning service Juni, which offers courses on investing, personal finance, entrepreneurship and other subjects that traditional schools often do not cover; Juni’s typical students are 8 to 18 years old, and its sign-ups surged after the coronavirus pandemic began.⁠[6]

On February 8, 2023, the Thiel Foundation announced the 20 members of the new class of the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry; he was 19th on the list, with Bloom as his project, and the list gives him as from San Francisco, CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry. The announcement describes Bloom as helping the next generation of Americans become more financially literate and build wealth. It states that the Thiel Fellowship, launched in 2011, encourages young people with big ideas to start companies instead of attending college, gives each fellow $100,000 and mentorship over two years, and requires fellows to pause their college enrollment to focus on their work; the new class joined 251 previous fellows. Alex Handy, director of the Thiel Fellowship, says in the announcement that more than a third of that year’s applicants had never applied to college and were instead following their own path.⁠[8]

On February 21, 2023, the startup newsletter Daily Dropout published a profile of Bloom whose team line lists Sonny Mo (CEO), Sam Yang (CPO) and Allan Maman (CMO). The profile states that more than 200,000 teenagers were investing on the app; it uses custodial accounts, through which parents open brokerage accounts for their children, teenagers aged 13 and older can trade stocks and ETFs, and the app has more than 80 interactive lessons. It adds that Bloom was hiring a founding engineer.⁠[4]

On July 31, 2023, TechCrunch published an article by Christine Hall on Bloom. The article describes Bloom as a zero-commission stock investing tool for teenage investors that provides a brokerage account and uses interactive lessons to teach users aged 13 and older about investing, stocks and finance; the app has an Instagram-like structure, reinforces lessons with quizzes, and awards points, the app’s currency, for correct answers, to be spent within the app; accounts have no minimum balance, and the service costs $15 a month or $120 a year.⁠[7]

The article states that Bloom had raised $4.4 million in total seed funding, much of it in 2022, from investors including Contrary, Slow Ventures, Offline Ventures, Rocketship VC, Slope and a group of angel investors that included Andrew Yang. It states that Bloom had reached 1 million downloads; users had completed more than 10 million lessons, the company had reached seven-figure annual recurring revenue in the past year, and users aged 18 to 25 had come to make up nearly three-quarters of the user base, which earlier consisted mostly of younger teenagers. The article states that Bloom planned to add retirement accounts and more freemium-style modules, with Allan Maman saying “We want users to stick with us for the long-term”, and it names Copper and Greenlight as companies in the same space that were expanding.⁠[7]

On September 28, 2023, MercuryMercury (fintech company)Mercury is an American fintech company founded in 2017 by Immad Akhund, Jason Zhang and Max Tagher; it launched account services for businesses in 2019. Its platform combines financial services provided by partner banks with software for bills, invoices and expense management. Mercury itself remains a fintech company; the proposed Mercury Bank, N.A. should be distinguished from the current partner-bank model.Open the full entry published on its blog a Q&A titled “Q&A: Allan Maman, co-founder & CEO of Bloom” which describes Allan Maman as Bloom’s co-founder and chief executive officer and does not mention him. In the interview Allan Maman says that Bloom started out as a teen investing app because the team realized that it was hard to start investing as a teenager, when the main options were a parent’s brokerage account or an older bank with a clunky interface, and that people over 18, particularly those aged 20 to 25, turned out to struggle with many of the same things, many of them having investment accounts without knowing what to do with them, so Bloom came to fill that gap. The article adds that the app rewards learners with stock points called “oinks”.⁠[9]

As of November 2026, Y Combinator’s company page gives Bloom’s status as Active, its team size as 8 and its location as New York City. Sam Yang’s profile on the page states that he founded Bloom and scaled it to 2 million users and $3.5 million in annual recurring revenue, and that he is now building novasoftware.ai.⁠[5]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[10]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sonny3690/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2][4]