The Hackney Founder Turning Spare Cash Into a Weapon Against the Cost of Living

Priya Mehta launched StackWise from a desk in a Bethnal Green co-working space eighteen months ago with £40,000 in personal savings and a conviction that most investment apps were built for people who already had money. Today her platform has 34,000 active users across the capital and processed £12 million in micro-investments during June alone.

The timing is not accidental. Average London rents hit £2,627 a month in the first quarter of 2026, according to data from Rightmove, while the Bank of England's base rate has edged back to 4.25 percent after a brief dip last autumn. Squeezed between high borrowing costs and relentless housing pressure, a growing number of Londoners are looking for any mechanism to grow the money they do manage to save. Mehta built StackWise specifically for that gap — the £50-a-month investor who gets priced out of traditional wealth management and ignored by the big retail banks.

StackWise works on a rounding model: users link their current accounts, the app rounds every transaction up to the nearest pound and sweeps the difference into a diversified portfolio of low-cost index funds and gilts. Someone buying a £3.40 flat white on Columbia Road contributes 60p to their portfolio. Do that 200 times a month — roughly the transaction frequency of the average London millennial, Mehta says — and you're investing £120 without noticing. The platform charges a flat 45p per month, deliberately undercutting rivals like Moneybox, which takes a percentage-based fee that compounds against smaller balances.

From Shoreditch Accelerator to Series A Conversations

StackWise graduated from the Bethnal Green Ventures accelerator programme in October 2024, one of 14 startups in that cohort. The programme, headquartered at The Bradfield Centre in Cambridge but running a dedicated London stream at offices near Old Street roundabout, gave Mehta access to a mentor network and £30,000 in non-dilutive grant funding. By March 2025 she had raised a £1.8 million seed round led by LocalGlobe, the early-stage fund based in Shoreditch's Tea Building on Shoreditch High Street.

She is now in early conversations with two institutional investors about a Series A that she expects to close before the end of 2026. The target raise is £8 million. Part of that capital is earmarked for a Credit Builder feature — essentially a secured micro-loan product tied to a user's StackWise portfolio — that Mehta hopes will help renters build credit histories strong enough to access mortgage products. Given that the average first-time buyer deposit in London now sits above £108,000, according to Halifax data published in May, the feature addresses something close to a structural crisis for the under-35s.

What the Numbers Actually Show

StackWise's internal data, shared with The Daily London ahead of publication, suggests the average user saves £94 a month through the rounding mechanism — nearly double the £52 national average self-reported saving rate cited by the Money and Pensions Service in its 2025 financial resilience survey. Users in Tower Hamlets and Islington show the highest engagement rates, which Mehta attributes partly to younger demographic profiles in those boroughs and partly to a targeted campaign on local community boards.

Independent fintech analyst firm Beauhurst flagged StackWise in its June 2026 quarterly report as one of 11 London-based fintechs to watch, noting the platform's customer acquisition cost of £3.20 is unusually low for the sector.

For anyone looking to sign up, the practical calculus is straightforward. StackWise works with most high-street current accounts including Barclays, NatWest and Starling, and the onboarding process takes under four minutes. The FCA-registered platform holds user funds in ring-fenced accounts at a tier-one custodian. Mehta's advice for first-time investors is blunt: start before you feel ready, set a portfolio allocation of at least 80 percent global equities if you're under 40, and resist the urge to check the balance every morning. The compounding, she argues, does the heavy lifting once you stop getting in its way.