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Aspiration
Fintech
Aspiration was a Los Angeles-based sustainability-focused neobank whose co-founder pleaded guilty to a $248 million investor fraud scheme that led the company into 2025 bankruptcy.
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Aspiration was founded in 2013 by Andrei Cherny and Joseph Sanberg and built its brand around being an environmentally conscious alternative to traditional banking, offering features such as automatic tree-planting tied to customer debit card purchases, a "pay what is fair" model letting customers set their own account fees, and a stated commitment to avoiding investments in fossil fuels. The company attracted a high-profile roster of celebrity investors, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Drake, and Robert Downey Jr., grew to claim more than five million customers, earned B Corp certification, and was named "Best for the World" multiple times, positioning itself as a flagship example of mission-driven, values-based fintech. That reputation collapsed following federal investigations that revealed co-founder Joseph Sanberg had orchestrated a roughly $248 million fraud scheme between 2021 and 2022, fabricating revenue by recruiting individuals and companies to sign letters of intent pledging payments for tree-planting services that Sanberg himself was secretly funding, artificially inflating Aspiration's reported revenue in order to support a planned $2.3 billion SPAC merger that ultimately fell through. Sanberg and a board member were also accused of falsifying financial statements to secure roughly $145 million in loans from investors. Aspiration's consumer banking operations were spun off in early 2024 to Mission Financial Partners, a company led by former Aspiration COO Tim Newell, and were rebranded in 2025 as GreenFi under new, unrelated ownership. Aspiration Partners itself filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March 2025 shortly after Sanberg's arrest, with its remaining assets liquidated by that summer; Sanberg pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud in October 2025 and was sentenced in June 2026 to 14 years in federal prison, making Aspiration's collapse a widely cited cautionary case study in ESG-branded fintech and startup governance.
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