Philly Builds is a guest post series profiling local founders and sharing why they chose Philadelphia as the place to launch and grow their startups. This edition is by Erin Feeney, president and chief product officer of InContext Solutions and co-organizer of the workgroup Philly Tech & AI Alliance.
Mical Jeanlys-White had her pick of cities to build WealthMore, a fintech startup connecting everyday investors with wealth advisors. She chose Philadelphia, and she recommends that other founders do the same.
“This is an amazing city to start a company,” Jeanlys-White said. “It has all of the right ingredients.”
In her view, the region offers what early-stage companies actually need to operate: strong universities, engineering talent and established industries to partner with. She points to local concentrations in healthcare, finance and manufacturing as part of what makes the market a fit for founders building practical technology.
“You can invest in companies at far more attractive valuations than you might elsewhere.”
Mical Jeanlys-White, WealthMore
Jeanlys-White has lived in the Philadelphia area for nearly 15 years, since attending Villanova as an undergraduate. WealthMore’s target audience is here, she said, and building close to the communities a company wants to serve is part of building a better product.
WealthMore brings together four things: a personal wealth advisor, an AI wealth coach, investment portfolios and a financial plan. Her team designed the platform around the full spectrum of what people need to build wealth, Jeanlys-White said, not just investing in isolation. That thinking also led to Mora, WealthMore’s AI wealth coach, which she said emerged in part from seeing how different users want different forms of support.
“For our younger users … the 25- to 35-year-old who is earlier in their wealth-building journey, they were actually the ones who asked for more of a coach, and hence our AI feature,” she said.
That intentionality also shows up in how Jeanlys-White thinks about where and how to build.
From Wall Street banking to a Peloton ‘aha’ moment
Before founding WealthMore, Jeanlys-White spent a decade at JPMorgan, where she managed a $22 billion credit card portfolio and served as general manager of Chase Slate. She also built My Chase Plan, the firm’s buy now, pay later platform, when that market was still nascent.
The idea for WealthMore came to her while riding a Peloton.
WealthMore founder Mical Jeanlys-White (Courtesy)
“If you can bring the best instructors in the world on a video screen attached to a bike,” she recalled thinking, “surely we can find the best wealth advisors and put them on a tech platform so anyone can have access to a wealth advisor.”
Getting from idea to company is never frictionless. As a first-time, nontechnical founder, Jeanlys-White said one of her biggest lessons has been about speed, iteration and reality-testing.
“Ship as fast as you can,” she said. “There’s nothing like a product being in the wild and users giving you feedback.”
No matter how carefully founders imagine users will behave, she noted, things change once people actually start touching the product. That lesson has shaped both WealthMore’s roadmap and how she thinks about startup building more broadly.
Talent, cost and culture as competitive advantages
Jeanlys-White was intentional about wanting key team members to be living in Philadelphia, even as other startup circles often push founders to concentrate talent elsewhere or default to remote and offshore structures.
It wasn’t just about the kind of energy and speed that comes from being able to whiteboard, debug and build together in person. It was specifically about this region.
“There’s a certain roll-up-your-sleeves, get-involved” culture here, she said. In her experience, Philly is less title-driven and less performative than some better-known tech hubs, and more oriented around getting the job done.
Cost is part of the equation. Compared with places like New York or California, she said, the region offers a much lower cost of living and significantly lower hiring costs, especially for technical talent. That can stretch runway, reduce pressure and let teams focus more of their mental energy on building rather than surviving. If employees aren’t simultaneously carrying crushing housing costs or unstable living situations, she added, that can change how a team performs.
For investors, she makes a similar case.
“I think Philly, you have the talent, the same potential upside as folks are building in large, large target market opportunities, but you can invest in companies at far more attractive valuations than you might elsewhere,” Jeanlys-White said.
“So you are getting all of the right ingredients, but with far more upside to those investments. That’s perfect.”