Anya Ozmen is a researcher, data scientist, and the founder of a fintech platform with over 1 million users. When she submitted the first version of Redvest to the App Store, Apple rejected it. This is the story of how that rejection shaped her journey as an entrepreneur.
Anya grew up in Turkey and moved to the US by herself when she was 18. In the middle of quarantine, she founded Redko, an AI software and mobile app development company, after working as a data scientist for less than a year. She saw a big opportunity in the AI development space and took a leap of faith in herself. She ended up teaching herself 13 programming languages to be able to deliver client projects with her team.
Redko’s first client was actually the company where she had worked as a data scientist. Its second client was a hedge fund. As they were building software for the hedge fund, Anya realized that there was a huge gap in the retail investing space. “Over 80% of retail investors lose money in the stock market. That is a major national problem. At the time, with Robinhood becoming so popular, people were starting to invest, yet the stats weren’t changing. Investing is easy, but making money is hard,” she says.
Learning to build while running a business
Anya started building an AI robo-advisor as a side project. When she submitted Redvest to the App Store, Apple rejected it, saying the company needed to be a broker. The original product could automatically trade once someone connected their brokerage account, using approaches like value investing and sentiment analysis according to their preferences and goals. She had a really hard time getting the app live on the App Store. She was young and learning everything on her own. To get her app live, she added a stock market simulator to Redvest. That addition ended up changing the direction of the company.
Following what users actually wanted
Once Redvest was live, it became clear that people needed help knowing where to begin. Over time, the team added more ways to learn through games, courses, competitions, and quizzes. Later on, Redvest expanded to the web. The biggest addition that moved the needle was gamification for learning, which vastly improved the user base’s success.
This experience changed how Anya thinks about product development. She emphasized that when she set aside her own perspective and listened to what users wanted, it changed everything for Redvest. The company grew as its users succeeded. While 80% of retail investors lose money in the stock market, 69–83% of Redvest users are profitable on Redvest, effectively learning to invest.
For founders working through a pivot, she recommends starting with what people are already choosing to do in the product, then asking what they are trying to accomplish and where they get stuck.
Following A Bigger Mission
Today, over one million Redvest users learn about investing and finance. Redvesters across more than 40 countries have completed over 38,000 quizzes and generated over $500 million in virtual order volume in the real-time stock market game.
Redvest’s mission is to democratize access to financial education and help Gen Z learn through playing, just as they did as children. Anya’s thesis is that games make learning more effective and efficient. Anya’s team also makes time to play games like Codenames and Pictionary on Fridays. As a self-taught programmer, founder, and investor, Anya says, “I know how hard it can be to start. That’s why I feel proudest when a customer sends an email expressing how much Redvest has helped them, especially with a new feature request attached. One moment I will always remember is seeing Redvest reach the Top 30 in the iOS Finance category. Its logo was sitting alongside major fintech companies. I teared up.”
The Redvest team is now working on partnerships with brokerages to bring educational tools into their platforms. The aim is to help people prepare as they begin investing. Alongside Redvest, Anya continues to run her development company, Redko, and is working on launching Redko’s deep-tech and AI impact incubator, Redko Labs, to help researchers and students build companies that solve major problems.
Anya encourages women and members of underserved communities to pursue their dreams in technical and entrepreneurial fields through mentoring and incubation. She thinks that the most useful lesson she learned from building Redvest is that even a rejection can turn into something that shapes a bigger and better journey.
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