By GREGORY ZELLER //
The Moiety App is an out-of-the-blocks sensation, with 45,000 Facebook “likes,” a burgeoning following on BlogPress and a just-announced partnership with Brighter Children, a charity supporting youth education in impoverished countries.
“I’ve created a belief,” founder Greg Wagner told Innovate LI. “I’ve created a movement.”
Come April, Wagner even plans to launch the app.
Created by Wagner’s Woodbury-based startup, Aeonic Ventures, the Moiety App is designed to simplify complicated family scheduling and budgeting, replacing dozens of time-consuming calls and confusing texts with easy swipes and clicks.
Moiety – it’s pronounced moy-a-tee – is usually defined as one of two equal parts, but it has many shades of gray in anthropology.
Applicable to any family unit or social subset – Wagner calls them “crews” – Moiety the App offers particular advantages to separated co-parents, including expense- and time-trackers and other data-gathering specifically for mediators and lawyers.
But simplified scheduling, Wagner noted, is the app’s primary function, making it ideal for modern families juggling study groups, soccer games, board meetings and dinner.
“Our mission is really to become the Fitbit of family, parenting, scheduling and expenses,” Wagner said. “Our long-term goal is to be a complete ecosystem, engineered to support families, mediators, judges and lawyers.
“But our initial objective is to simplify complicated family schedules.”
That’s the message preached through Moiety’s social media campaigns, leading to a cult-like following that, according to Wagner, is largely comprised of separated or divorced parents.
“I wouldn’t say it’s a ‘divorce app,’” he noted. “But the community that’s been following me has been primarily interested in the co-parenting tools.”
The appeal is not surprising considering Wagner, who is divorced, based Moiety’s functionality on his personal scheduling experiences. It comes from “a real need of my own,” he said, and the needs of his mother (a primary babysitter) and needs he found common among many friends “who just don’t have something like this, mobile and easy to follow.”
Also feeding Wagner’s startup enterprise are his two decades of international finance, product-launch and business-formation experience. After earning a bachelor’s in economics from SUNY Albany and an MBA from Fordham University, he went on to work at numerous investment banks, including multiple positions – rising to chairman and CEO – at RBS Securities, a U.S. investment bank/broker-dealer owned by Royal Bank of Scotland.
He also served as an equity finance director at ABN AMRO Inc., the largest state-owned bank in the Netherlands, among other executive positions in the global finance realm.
Wagner currently wears several hats: In addition to running Aeonic Ventures, which he launched in February 2015, he sits on the board of ANF Capital, a Canadian financial consultancy advising midsized North American corporations. He’s also chairman of the ANF Capital Bridge Fund, a financial middle-man between hundreds of importers moving product – mostly grain – into Zimbabwe and the African corporations that receive it.
And Wagner is chairman and CEO of the Brazil Securities Lending Association, a nonprofit he founded in 2013 to increase international awareness of that country’s securities lending, with a side focus on facilitating charitable contributions where Brazilians need them most.
Those myriad experiences and goals all factor into Aeonic Ventures, which supports two distinct verticals. The startup guides other early-stage companies during the business-formation and capital-investment processes, and will soon commercialize the much-anticipated Moiety App.
“I don’t have a direct entrepreneurial background,” Wagner noted. “But all of my time in the financial arena has been about creating products. And some of them have been trademarked and copyrighted, so I do have a strong product-development background.”
The name “Moiety App” has been trademarked, though Wagner said he’d wait to apply for a patent until the app was “in the latter stages of its evolution.”
“It will become a full digital ecosystem for families, mediators, lawyers and judges,” he said, but that ecosystem is still a year or two away, “depending on how many partnerships I can develop, as opposed to how many native solutions we need.”
He’s already started the ball rolling on what he hopes will be a $2 million to $3 million VC round, pitching to associates with more presentations planned. For now, the app – which was originally slated to go live this month – is still being beta-tested, with a programmer in Louisiana adding new solutions.
Installing sensitive bells and whistles designed specifically for lawyers in the middle of divorcing parents takes time, Wagner noted, and “I’d rather wait and have it done right than rush it out.”
When the Moiety App does debut, it will follow a pay structure that keeps the basic scheduling/calendar service free for all users – although they’ll face some banner advertising – and charges “a few bucks,” Wagner said, for an ad-free premium platform that includes gadgets like a countdown clock and a dashboard that tracks parenting time and expenses.
There will also be “white label solutions” for lawyers and judges, he noted, including courtroom-critical data analytics that will be available for “a different number.” Those top levels will be where the Moiety App makes its bones, but at its heart, it will always be a free scheduling app that provides swipe-left and click-here simplicity for any family or “crew” in need of coordination, according to its creator.
“If you’re a 10-year-old kid and you want to set up a crew to play Minecraft online, this is perfect for that,” Wagner said. “If you’re a traditional family or a single co-parent, this will help with the sometimes painful logistics of taking care of kids.
“I won’t be the first or the last person to develop a calendar tool,” he added. “But this has the most advanced technology out there and it makes scheduling as easy as humanly possible.”
Moiety App
What’s It? A mobile app for family scheduling and budgeting, with specific functions for co-parenting situations
Brought To You By: International financing expert (and divorced dad) Greg Wagner
All In: A modest personal investment, mostly for outsourced app development
Status: Coming soon, but already killing it on Facebook
