Noticing many friends were getting hooked on online gambling or struggling to save money, Concordia undergrad Benjamin Thomas felt compelled to counter those instincts with healthier financial habits. Together with McGill students Luke Freund and Arie Mednikov, he founded Lodavo a Montreal startup that has launched a prize-linked savings app they hope will change their peers' relationship with money.
"We care deeply about helping students and young adults build better saving habits," says Thomas, a Finance and Computer Science student and the company's CEO. "Our mission is to make saving feel exciting and rewarding, especially for people who find traditional personal finance tools boring or hard to stick with."
In his first year at Concordia, Thomas learned about prize-linked savings accounts, which introduce an element of gamification to motivate users.
"It sounded like a great concept, and there were super popular companies in the U.S. and the United Kingdom doing this. The technology coming out at the time was also making this a lot easier to implement, and I thought, Why don't we have this in Canada?" he recalls.
"I've seen peers spend too much on gambling especially sports betting while struggling to build any real savings. I've always been a big saver and personal finance nerd, and I've wanted to help create something that channels that same excitement, but instead of risking money, people can save more and build real financial progress."
How it works
The idea behind Lovado is simple: blend the goal to save money with the chance to win prizes. Sign up for free, securely connect an existing bank account, and save money each week. No minimum balance is required, so the platform is accessible to anyone who signs up.
The more a user saves, the more tickets they earn, which increases their chance to win cash prizes. There's a guaranteed weekly draw for $100, plus the chance to win a grand prize of $10,000 if all seven of a user's numbers match the winning numbers drawn.
Like any contest-based system, the odds of winning can vary, but the user's principal is secure, meaning they either save, or save more.
The founders are promoting their app as "combining the thrill of the lottery with the security of saving."
"There's no way you can lose your money: we don't touch the funds, and we don't have access to passwords," Thomas explains. "We allow users to track their savings progress in our app through our secure third party, Plaid, so it's all fully encrypted."
The prize money comes from partnerships, collaborations, promotional campaigns and the founders' personal funds.
A helping hand
Thomas says he's grateful for support received from District 3's Innovation Hub in 2022.
"They gave us a co-working space and helped us take those first steps: looking into the idea and making sure it's a big problem we could solve," Thomas says.
"In 2024, we received funding from the Gina Cody School Innovation Fund, plus mentorship from professor Emad Shihab and Pascal Dubois [advisor of innovation and research funding development]. They loved what we were working on, which has been meaningful as we've continued building," he says.
Overcoming common startup hurdles
The Lovado co-founders say that balancing full-time studies and their respective careers while building the app has proven challenging.
"I did some internships in finance throughout my degree, and Luke did some in software engineering, which was really tough. But working on the startup didn't feel like extra work; it's a passion project," Thomas says.
The co-founders also had to deal with the technical complexity of building a secure app and ensuring the prize draws would be fair.
"We've made so much progress in the past few months because we've incorporated some new AI tools that are getting really good," he adds.
In the leadup to the app's launch, 1,000 people signed up for the waiting list thanks to word-of-mouth, a poster campaign and a growing online presence.
"This was a new world to us, but as founders, our job is to learn about everything," Thomas says. "Recently, with Arie coming on board, we've focused on growing our social media. In the past couple of months, we've gotten five million impressions."
Once he graduates this May, Thomas will begin an internship at Black Ice Capital, a private investment firm.
"I'm really excited to learn about the industry, meet people in the venture capital and startup worlds, and then hopefully be able to apply some of those learnings to Lodavo," he says.
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