Funded by Us. Answerable to You.

Outside investment comes with outside pressure, to raise prices, hit growth targets, and optimize for returns over users. We’ve structured Kove to avoid that entirely.

Independence means we don’t raise prices because an investor needs a better quarter. It means we don’t sell your data or introduce ads because we need another revenue stream. It means the only people we’re accountable to are the ones actually using the product.

There’s one thing worth being upfront about: we do occasionally receive non-dilutive funding, like research grants. These aren’t investments, no equity changes hands, nobody owns any piece of Kove or Keane Financials because of them, and there’s no expectation of a return. They fund specific purchases, not a stake in the company.

For example, we received a $750 undergraduate research grant from Western Washington University’s Research and Sponsored Programs (RSP) department, which went toward Kove-related costs, marketing, AI spend, and Plaid fees for student users. That grant had no effect on Kove’s ownership, structure, or pricing.

The line we care about isn’t “did any outside money touch this company,” it’s whether that money comes with someone else’s opinion on how fast we should grow or what we should charge. Investment does. A grant for specific costs doesn’t. We’ll take the second kind when it’s there; we won’t take the first.

Kove is purely subscription-based. That’s it.

No ads. No data sales. No hidden monetization. If you’re not paying a subscription, we’re not making money off you.

Kove was started as a student project and has been kept lean by design. Student access to development tools, careful infrastructure choices, and deliberate spending have kept startup costs minimal, serious expenses have been little more than the legal filings to establish the company properly, supplemented occasionally by non-dilutive grants like the one below.

One of our long-term goals is B Corp certification. It’s a high bar, and that’s the point. B Corp status would formalize what we already try to operate by: that a company can be built to serve people, not just profit from them.

We’re in the early stages, but it’s a goal we plan around and one we’d be honored to achieve.