Intuit (Owners of Quicken) Purchase Mint for $170 million

After seeing rapid growth in a two-year period, Mint has been acquired by financial-software giant Intuit.  An impressive valuation for a firm that began on a shoestring budget offering a free product.

The CEO of mint has written an interesting history of their company for TechCrunch.  Some excerpts:

And so here we are two years later. We’ve attracted over 1.5 million users, found over $300 million in savings, managed $50 billion in assets, and helped people track nearly $200 billion in purchases. Most importantly, we’ve helped a lot of people better understand and do more with their money. Thousands of people have told us that Mint.com has helped them pay off debt, control their spending, manage job loss, and even resolve money disputes with their significant other…

…So that’s the Mint story. $0 to $170m in three years flat. While everyone else was doing social media, music, video or the startup de jour, we tried to ground ourselves in what any business should be doing: solve a real problem for people. Make something that is faster, more efficient, cheaper (in this case free), and innovate on technology or business model to make a healthy revenue stream doing it.

This integration of Quicken Online with Mint makes Intuit the owner of two of the largest personal finance software programs on the web.
photo credit: zolierdos