The two of us always wanted to build something useful for Sri Lanka. While brainstorming ideas, we kept coming back to the same frustration: how painful it is to manually track expenses every day. We both come from engineering and product backgrounds, our jobs keep us busy, and even though we care about managing money, we'd always forget to log our expenses. So we thought, "Why not automate this? Why not build it for ourselves first, and see if we can find other people who are willing to use it because they're facing the same problem?" That's how Kiwi Money started. What began as solving our own headache has grown into a money manager with 5,000+ downloads here in Sri Lanka. The challenge is that open banking doesn't exist here yet. There are no APIs to connect to banks, so automating anything around money is genuinely hard. That's why we rely on SMS messages from banks. But we also knew SMS can be tricky when it comes to privacy, so from day one we built Kiwi with a privacy-first approach where your data stays on your device. We have a big vision for this. We want to build a fintech company out of Sri Lanka that stands alongside the likes of YNAB, Rocket Money, and Wealthsimple. Not just creating awareness and breaking barriers around money here, but making it as easy as possible for everyone to track, understand, and take control of their finances. That's what the two of us are working towards.

Kiwi Money

Sri Lanka's first automated expense tracker

Sri Lanka's first automated expense tracker