Bulletins

Acorns will go public via a SPAC merger at $2.2 billion valuation

The online savings and investment app said it has more than 4 million customers.

​The Acorns app appears on a smartphone.

The Acorns app appears on a smartphone.

Photo: Tiffany Hagler-Geard/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Acorns is going public via a SPAC merger in a deal that values the savings and investment app at $2.2 billion, the company said Thursday.

The startup said it will merge with Pioneer Merger, a publicly-traded special purpose acquisition company. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2021.

Acorns, which is based in Irvine, Calif., said it has more than 4 million customers in the U.S. and expects that to grow to 10 million by 2025.

Founded in 2012, Acorns was part of a wave of fintech startups that sought to make investing easier. The company became famous for an app that lets users automatically invest or save spare change from everyday purchases.

Benjamin Pimentel

Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers crypto and fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Google Voice at (925) 307-9342.

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