Intuit To Acquire (Former TechCrunch50 Winner) Mint For $170 Million

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by Michael Arrington on September 13, 2009

Intuit will acquire the free online personal finance service Mint, we’ve confirmed from a source close to the deal, for around $170 million. Silicon Alley Insider first reported a rumor on this. The deal should be announced in the next few days.

Update: CEO Aaron Patzer has just confirmed the deal on-stage at TechCrunch50, and written a guest post describing The Value of TechCrunch50 that contains more details.

This is a terrific exit for Mint, which first launched two years ago at TechCrunch50. Mint took the top prize at that event and has been growing fast ever since. Their last round of financing valued the company at $140 million.

In all, Mint has raised $32 million over three venture rounds.

Earlier this year Mint and Intuit had a humorous clash over Mint advertising claims of gaining 3,000 new users a day and jumping from 600,000 to 850,000 users in a matter of months. Intuit sent a letter to Mint demanding an explanation for this apparently inconceivable feat, which we obtained and printed here.

We have just one question for founder and CEO Aaron Patzer, though. Can we please have our $50,000 grand prize back? It seems like you don’t really need it any more.

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CrunchBase Information

Mint.com

Website:	mint.com
Location:	Mountain View, California, United States
Founded:	November 1, 2006
Acquired:	September, 2009 by Intuit for $170M

Mint.com is a free online personal finance service that is aimed at being “easy and secure way to manage and save money online.” The service is accessible anywhere, anytime over the web.

Launched in September, 2007, the company states that… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

My paypal account has more money that I can handle in Mint :)

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3/4ths of experienced entrepreneurs didn't rely on venture capital

I just completed a research project in which we interviewed the founders of 549 successful companies in several high-growth industries – the ones VC’s are most likely to fund. We selected companies that had made it out of the garage and were generating real revenue. Guess what? Hardly ten percent of the serial entrepreneurs took venture money in their first startups. In their subsequent launches, the proportion who took venture money went up to a quarter. In other words, three-quarters of even the most experienced entrepreneurs didn’t rely on venture capital

--UC Berkeley Visiting Scholar Vivek Wadhwa via techcrunch.com

RecipePuppy.com is a really smart way to find recipes based on ingredients you have in your kitchen. There are so many recipe sites out there, but this one is really, really smart. I can imagine myself (and Kate!) using it all the time. 

There seem to be two ways to get started at RecipePuppy.com:
 
1. Go to their homepage, http://www.recipepuppy.com, and search by the ingredients that you have. For example, "chicken + onions + chocolate"

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2. Go to http://www.recipepuppy.com/how and search for a basic dish, like "chicken"

Once you have selected a dish, you are presented with a list of all the ingredients used in all the chicken recipes on the site, ranked by how frequently they appear:

Chicken only appears in 44.4% of recipes for chicken? Odd.
 
Anyway, at this point you check the items that you have. You don't have to go through the whole list, but you should do the top bunch since they are the most common.
 
You are then presented with a list of recipes! You can easily see what ingredients are needed in each one. Bold items you said you already have, +items are ones you need. You can click to say you do or don't have something, and narrow things down to the recipe you're going to cook!

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The site is still in beta, and needs a lot of design work and overall polish. But it's very smart, very fast, and solves a real problem that I have everyday. Now that's a recipe for a successful startup!