Alexa von Tobel

Alexa von Tobel is the founder and CEO of LearnVest.com, the leading personal finance and lifestyle website for women. Alexa developed the idea for LearnVest in 2006, during her senior year at Harvard College when she realized she, and most of her peers, had never had any formal education on how to effectively manage their finances. Alexa searched for reliable financial guidance and consistently came up overwhelmed or disappointed. Thus, the LearnVest mission was born – to make trusted personal financial information accessible to millions of women across the country.

After receiving her degree in Psychology at Harvard College, Alexa worked as a trader at Morgan Stanley on their Proprietary Trading Desk before leaving to be the Head of Business Development at Drop.io, a venture-backed start-up in NYC. She enrolled in Harvard Business School in the Fall of 2008 only to take a leave of absence shortly after to launch LearnVest and pursue her dream of bringing financial literacy to millions of women everywhere.

In just under five months, Alexa raised $1.1 million of seed funding from Angel investors and less than a year later, she closed a Series A round of funding totaling $4.5 million from Accel Partners. To date, Learnvest has raised outside equity of $72 million, from investors including Accel Partners, AmericanExpress Ventures and Northwestern Mutual Capital.

Since launching LearnVest in 2009 at TechCrunch50, Alexa has been widely quoted as a personal finance expert and entrepreneur in top tier business and consumer publications including New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, BusinessWeek, Marie Claire, ForbesWoman, The Huffington Post and many more.

In addition, Alexa has appeared on several major local and national television shows including The Today Show, CNN, The Rachael Ray Show, The Nate Berkus Show, Fox Business News, CNN, ABC News, Bloomberg News, and The Gayle King Show among many others.

Alexa has been included on Vanity Fair's 2011 Next Establishment list, featured on Business Insider's 2010 and 2011 Silicon Alley 100 lists, named "One of the Coolest Young Entrepreneurs" in Inc. Magazine's 30 Under 30 feature, titled a "Woman to Watch" by Forbes and included on the publication's 30 Under 30 list, highlighted on BusinessWeek's annual list of "Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs," and named to the Ernst & Young Entrepreneurial Winning Women Class of 2011.

In addition to LearnVest, Alexa is the co-founder of L.W.A.L.A., a 501c3 focused on fighting HIV/AIDS in Africa.

Alexa has spoken at Harvard Business School, Columbia Business School, Princeton, Yale, SXSW and at Maria Shriver's Women's Conference.

Her first book, "Financially Fearless: The Learnvest Program for Taking Control Of Your Money," provided a financial game plan tailored to the readers ability to integrate their financial plan into their mobile, social, and digital life. Her second book "Financially Forward: How to Use Today's Digital Tools to Earn More, Save Better, and Spend Smarter", encompasses technology in a new way to better your chances of financial freedom.