Kiara Scott and Alisha Chowdhury each had to learn about money largely on their own. Their parents had not learned about personal finance, so topics like budgeting and saving for college, building good credit, and investing for generational wealth were not part of their family conversations.
Years later, they each built a business to make financial guidance more accessible to others facing similar gaps. Kiara founded Free Money Meister, a platform that helps students find and apply for scholarships to reduce the financial burden of higher education. Alisha founded Kiro Money, an AI-powered platform that helps banks and fintechs offer personalized financial coaching to their customers.
In 2026, Village Capital’s Women in Tech Accelerator, in collaboration with Standard Chartered Foundation, connected them. Through the program’s peer-to-peer sessions, Kiara and Alisha built a bond that quickly grew into a partnership: Kiro Money’s financial coaching technology is now integrated into Free Money Meister’s platform, giving students access to broader money guidance alongside scholarship support.
Bridging the Financial Knowledge Gap from Different Sides
Kiara’s experience finding scholarships to fund her education shaped Free Money Meister. During her freshman year at Notre Dame of Maryland University, a bad business deal had cost her parents their savings and emptied her college fund. With tuition at over USD 40K a year, Kiara’s heart sank as she wondered, “What am I going to do?”
She began applying for scholarships, grants, and fellowships. Over time, she turned her search into a system. She reused essays across applications and used advanced Google searches to uncover overlooked opportunities tied to her family circumstances. When she got her first win, she shared, “My heart skipped a beat.”
Through scholarships, grants, fellowships, and a loan paydown program, Kiara funded five years of her higher education and earned two degrees with no student loan debt. She built Free Money Meister to help others do the same. The SaaS platform, which Kiara calls “a smarter way to find and apply for scholarships,” offers dynamic scholarship matching and an easy-to-implement, month-by-month game plan to help students graduate debt-free.
Alisha Chowdhury and Kiro Money: Trusted and Personalized Embedded Financial Guidance
Alisha’s path into financial coaching began with her own experience of having to figure things out. As the daughter of immigrant parents working service jobs, she found her own ways to pay for sports and school trips. But when she arrived at the University of Pennsylvania on a full scholarship, she saw just how wide the financial knowledge gap was. “My classmates all dreamed of careers in investment banking,” she recalled. “I had never even heard of that term.”
After graduating, Alisha immersed herself in the financial system. Through jobs at Vanguard, Fidelity, and a private equity fund, she found mentors among her colleagues and learned everything she could about personal finance and investing. She then began sharing that knowledge through a financial coaching practice, primarily supporting immigrant families like her own.
While pursuing her MBA, ChatGPT was released. She wanted to incorporate it into her coaching practice, but noticed it gave her clients the wrong answers. She then used retrieval-augmented generation technology to build an accurate AI version of herself, which eventually became Kiro Money — the first B2B embedded AI financial intelligence platform that integrates 24/7 contextual AI coaching directly into banking and fintech applications.
Alisha Chowdhury, CEO & Co-Founder of Kiro Money, stands alongside a group of young women at Columbia University, where she led a workshop on investing and saving to build wealth
Peers Turned Partners in the Women in Tech Accelerator
In Village Capital’s accelerator, Kiara and Alisha joined other founders working to improve economic mobility and access to essential services. They were impressed by each other from the start. Alisha called Kiara “the most prepared person I’ve ever met.” Kiara saw Alisha’s grit and recalls thinking, “I knew she was going somewhere.”
Both credit the program’s peer-to-peer sessions with helping them form a bond and make business decisions. Kiara added new customer segments and contract types, while Alisha pivoted Kiro Money from direct-to-consumer to business-to-business. As they shared feedback, they also began to understand where their businesses could complement one another.
Kiara wanted to add an AI chatbot to her platform, and Alisha was looking to expand into the edtech space and get real-time feedback from users. Within a few weeks, Kiro Money was embedded into Free Money Meister.
Now, alongside personalized scholarship support, Free Money Meister students can get broader financial guidance from Kiro Money’s AI assistant. Getting started is simpler, too, with the ability to ask simple questions like, “Where do I start?” Kiara can see what students are asking and tailor the product to their needs, while Alisha expands access to her tools and resources for a broader audience.
Their relationship goes beyond business. Kiara and Alisha continue to guide one another throughout the ups and downs of building a company, from sharing funding opportunities like CAFE FinTech to navigating SOC-2 compliance. “It’s been a really reciprocal relationship,” Alisha says.
The Lasting Wealth Their Partnership Makes Possible
Today, both companies are reaching thousands, and their founders are just getting started.
Free Money Meister has served over 200 users. In June 2026, Kiara watched four students receive over USD 8K in scholarships in a single day. Kiro Money has supported over 6,000 young adults, helping users collectively save and invest over USD 2M. Its self-service API is used by over 35 fintechs and is rolling out to over 30 local financial institutions. Kiro Money was also selected as one of two peer-selected Women in Tech startups to receive an equity-free grant.
The accelerator gave Kiara and Alisha space to exchange honest feedback and build trust. That peer connection led to a customer relationship between their companies, bringing scholarship support and financial coaching together on one platform. Their partnership now gives students access to guidance both founders had to seek out for themselves.