You, me, and the money: How ex-Stripe Emily Luk built a financial management app for couples, Plenty

Managing money alone is hard enough but when two people and their respective money stories get married, things can get a lot more complicated.

This is the problem Plenty’s CEO and cofounder Emily Luk set out to solve after she got engaged. She noticed a lack of financial tools for couples and decided to build Plenty, a financial tool that helps couples manage their finances in one place.

Plenty allows couples to track shared and individual finances, as well as save and invest towards shared and personal goals.

“There was one thing that was really different from how we thought about things as a generation. There wasn’t really an expectation that one person works, one person manages all the money. No, we’re both working. But it was so hard even to do the simplest thing – we both use a credit card, and I want both of us to know what we’re spending on it,” said Luk.

This is how Emily Luk built a finch that has seen 8x growth in users since December 2024.

From fintech employee to fintech founder

Luk is no stranger to the financial industry. She was one of the first 20 members of Stripe’s growth team and in her three years at the company ran initiatives like pricing merchants across the different geographies and forecasting for all the firm’s software products.

“Stripe really was one of the first companies to take a part of the financial industry and really digitize it. I think that was one of the things that I saw: for so long, payments was such a legacy business, and yet they were able to modernize it,” Luk said. After Stripe, Luk joined Even which was later acquired by Walmart for its fintech venture, One. At Even, Luk was the VP of Strategy and Operations running the company’s goal setting efforts as well as fundraising and investor relations. “Even was really focused on helping people living paycheck to paycheck, reach a point of stability. What was really exciting there is we ended up building a product that reached a million and a half people. Through that, I had a chance to see how big of an impact we could make making software,” she said.

While the hard and soft skills that Luk built in her time at Stripe and Even have a clear carry over effect to Plenty, her connections within the industry have had an effect too.

The following are all investors in Plenty:

• Adam Nash, ex-CEO of Wealthfront,
• Brian Delahunty, Head of Engineering at Anthropic
• Mark Goines ex-SVP at Intuit and ex-VP at Charles Schwab are all investors in Plenty.
• Kevin Durant, all-star professional basketball player