New York, July 20, 2025
CBS:
The world of investing is not just for Wall Street any more. It’s getting a makeover, thanks to disruptors in this space, and thanks to two young entrepreneurs who are joining us this morning. Alinea Invest is a wealth management app built by GenA for GenZ. Joining us now are its co-founders, Eve Halimi and Anam Lakhani, Forbes 30 Under 30 alum. First of all, what an accomplishment! Congratulations! Very impressive. I want to jump into this App. How does this help everyday people with their investments?
Alinea / Eve:
So, when you get on the Alinea app, download the app, the first thing we are going to do is to give you an AI Ally or AI Coach, who is going to guide you through the journey, asking a few questions about yourself to generate a personalized investment portfolio for you, the amount you should invest every month. And you just sit back and watch your money grow, while we educate you on market news, market recaps and portfolio recaps, and guide you along the way.
CBS:
Like so many entrepreneurs, I am guessing that you started Alinea because something is missing in the space for you, and you got involved, and obviously the rest is history. What was missing in the space that you think Alinea does and takes care of?
Alinea / Anam:
Absolutely! Eve and I both interned at Wall Street, we saw how conversation around money and investing are just limited to a certain group of people. What we want to do is to bring the conversation on money and investing to everyone else who doesn’t feel like a typical financial pro. So what Alinea does is to meet people at exactly where they are. If you go to any other investing app, you have to decode charts, and you will have to really get into the technical knowledge of things. But Alinea meets exactly where your knowledge level is, what your financial goals are, and guides you from that point.
Eve and I both interned at Wall Street, we saw how conversation around money and investing are just limited to a certain group of people. What we want to do is to bring the conversation on money and investing to everyone else who doesn’t feel like a typical financial pro. So what Alinea does is to meet people at exactly where they are. If you go to any other investing app, you have to decode charts, and you will have to really get into the technical knowledge of things. But Alinea meets exactly where your knowledge level is, what your financial goals are, and guides you from that point.
CBS:
You know we are seeing a boom in GenZ women investing, but we also see the reality that many people live paycheck by paycheck. How do you balance the reality with long-term, financial planning?
Alinea / Anam:
The biggest misconception is that I will do it when I am rich. And that is not how it works. If you are 22 and you are investing $100 a week, you can retire with $1.2 million dollars. But if you wait for 10 years to start, that amount will actually drop half to $540,000 dollars. So the best thing that you can do, like any other habits whether it's health or learning, is to start as early as possible and be consistent.
CBS:
Awesome! So this is a really cool stats, 92% of your users are women. So how do you build something that resonates so strongly with women?
Alinea / Eve:
Right. We have over 1 million users on Alinea and 92% being female, and over 70% of them are GenZ. The way that we capture this market is first to get on social media. So we build a really strong social media brand, from TikTok to Instagram. And we do something that is not traditional. And we have a TikTok page called Anam & Eve. It's founder-led marketing. It’s us providing user feedback. It’s us telling our users what’s coming up from our products. We are really speaking to our community and building our community through social media, and meeting GenZ at their pace. That is not something that Vanguard or Fidelity CEO would do for you. And what we did for brand building.
CBS:
Meeting people where they are, that’s smart. I love the idea of an investing playlist. I am told that’s part of the App. Is it just the soundtrack of The Wolf of Wall Street? What are we talking about here?
Alinea / Anam:
Yeah. If you think about investing, it is basically designing how the feature will unfold and putting dollars behind it. So what an investing playlist is essentially you can choose a group of stocks and you can customize how you want to allocate on the bundle and you can even give it a name. It’s like a music playlist, but for investing. And everyday, we have thousands of members creating their investing playlists around trending themes, like AI, fighting climate change, and clean beauty. So at the end of the day, investing is just another form of self-expression.
CBS:
I love the idea of why you started and the fact that the language around investing is exclusive to some people, and they don’t understand it. So what would you say to somebody who has felt it this way in the past and is listening today, and felt overwhelmed about starting investing? What would you say to that person?
Alinea / Eve:
Get started with Alinea! We built Alinea for that reason, for people who don’t know where to get started and for people who don’t know how much to invest. So Alinea is your best friend for anything that is money related. We are here to guide you along the way. We are here to tell you what is investing, and how much to invest every month, and to educate you. So our mission is to create an AI-powered wealth advisor with a human team to manage the portfolio.
CBS:
And hopefully to help people to make money.
Alinea : Yes, absolutely.
CBS:
Thank you so much for joining us. Wish you continued success.
See the full interview: https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/video/app-uses-ai-to-help-gen-z-navigate-wealth-management/