At Scholastic Book Fairs across Canada this fall, the cashless checkout option of choice was not Visa, Interac, or a parent's tap-to-pay phone. It was Mydoh, the prepaid Smart Cash Card that lives in the pocket of a nine-year-old [Facebook, October 2025]. For a four-year-old company building inside a major bank, that is a quietly meaningful piece of distribution. Most kids do not have a wallet. Mydoh is trying to be the first one they reach for.
Launched on August 11, 2021 by RBC Ventures, Mydoh is a free money management app paired with a reloadable prepaid card aimed at Canadian families [RBCx, August 2021]. Parents fund the card. Kids spend, save, and track. The app layers in chores and allowance, so a teenager mowing the lawn or walking the dog earns money that lands directly on their card [Mydoh]. There are no monthly fees and no commitment to sign up [Mydoh]. The wedge is simple: turn the weekly allowance conversation, historically a kitchen-table negotiation conducted in loonies and IOUs, into a banking habit.
The bet
The product thesis is that financial literacy is best taught with real money in a controlled environment, and that parents will adopt a tool that gives them visibility without turning into a surveillance app. Co-founders Faria Rahman and Gaurav Kapoor, who met during their MBAs at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, built Mydoh inside RBC's venture studio rather than on the open VC market [Mydoh; Crunchbase]. That is the structural choice that defines the company. Mydoh is a wholly-owned subsidiary of RBCx [Crunchbase], which means it trades the upside-and-pressure of a priced seed round for distribution muscle, regulatory cover, and a balance sheet that does not need to fundraise every 18 months. Funding terms have not been disclosed [PitchBook].
The customer is a Canadian parent with a tween or teen, the kind who used to hand over a $20 bill on Friday and hope for the best. The cross-sell logic for RBC is obvious: a kid who learns to budget on Mydoh at age 11 is a plausible RBC chequing customer at 18. That is a long-duration bet a fintech startup with a 24-month runway could not credibly make. RBCx can.
Why it could be big
The global kid-and-teen banking category has produced real outcomes elsewhere. Greenlight in the U.S. and GoHenry in the U.K. (acquired by Acorns in 2023) demonstrated that parents will pay, often monthly, for a card and app combination that handles allowance, chores, and savings. Mydoh's no-fee posture is a sharper offer in a market, Canada, where the incumbent debit experience for minors is largely a parental joint account or nothing at all. The Scholastic Book Fairs deployment is the kind of trust signal that is hard to buy with paid acquisition [Facebook, October 2025]. Schools do not lightly hand a payments rail to a startup.
The RBCx parentage matters here too. RBC is Canada's largest bank by market capitalization, and Mydoh's app terms route directly into RBC's mobile wallet and prepaid agreements [Mydoh app terms]. Compliance, KYC, and card issuance, the three things that quietly kill consumer fintech timelines, are inherited rather than built.
Team and traction
Kapoor serves as CEO and Rahman as co-founder, both with Rotman MBAs and RBC Ventures pedigrees [Crunchbase; LinkedIn]. The company added Michelle Rutherford as Chief Marketing Officer on June 1, 2025 [ZoomInfo], a hire that suggests Mydoh is moving from product-build mode into demand-generation mode. Headcount is reported at 34 [StartupSeeker], a lean number consistent with a venture-studio company that outsources its banking infrastructure to its parent.
| Milestone | Date |
|---|---|
| Mydoh launched by RBC Ventures | August 11, 2021 |
| Scholastic Book Fairs cashless partnership confirmed | October 30, 2025 |
| Michelle Rutherford joins as CMO | June 1, 2025 |
The honest counterfactual
The credible bear case is competitive and structural. Greenlight, Step, and Current have spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars proving that kid-finance is a hard category to monetize without a subscription, and Mydoh has explicitly chosen the no-fee path [Mydoh]. Bears will ask: where does the revenue come from, and does corporate ownership cap the ambition at "useful RBC funnel" rather than "standalone consumer brand"? The bull answer, supported by the cited evidence, is that Mydoh does not need to be a standalone P&L to matter. If it captures the under-18 banking relationship in Canada at zero acquisition cost to RBC, the lifetime value sits on the parent company's books, not Mydoh's. The Scholastic deployment and the CMO hire suggest the company is still pressing on growth, not winding down to a feature inside the RBC app.
What to watch
The next 12 months will tell us whether Mydoh is a product or a platform. Three things to track: whether the Scholastic relationship expands beyond book fairs into school-wide cashless payments, whether Mydoh launches a teen-focused savings or investing product that would extend the customer relationship past age 16, and whether RBCx ever discloses user numbers, which would signal confidence in the trajectory. A French-language push into Quebec, hinted at by the bilingual site footer [Mydoh], would be the cheapest expansion available.
The interesting question for readers is not whether Mydoh wins the Canadian kid-finance market. It probably does, by default and by distribution. The interesting question is what RBC does with the customer relationship once those kids turn 18. Does Mydoh graduate them, or does it hand them off? Watch the product roadmap in 2026.