Before she was a founder, Catherine “Cat” Berman spent years as a Managing Director at Charles Schwab, building financial products from the inside of one of the largest brokerages in the country. In 2016, she left to co-found CNote with Yuliya Tarasava, betting that there was a way to connect everyday investor capital to community lenders — without asking anyone to sacrifice returns to do it.
CNote’s premise is that the $5 trillion community finance market — the Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) and community banks that fund small businesses, affordable housing, and underserved neighborhoods — has been largely invisible to institutional capital, not because the returns aren’t there, but because the infrastructure to access them wasn’t. CNote built that infrastructure: a platform that lets companies and individual investors move cash into vetted community lenders with the same ease as any other cash-management product.
It’s worked. CNote now has more than $300 million on its platform, routed through roughly 2,000 partner CDFIs to some 1,900 investors — corporate clients include Apple, Mastercard, Patagonia, PayPal, and Netflix, several of whom use CNote specifically to meet diversity, equity, and inclusion goals with their idle cash. The company has grown 370% since 2020 and was profiled as a case study by the U.S. Treasury’s CDFI Fund — the kind of validation that’s hard to manufacture.
Berman has been direct about why she built it: “I want to build a more equal world — one where new immigrants like my mother would have the same opportunity my daughter has today.” It’s a personal stake dressed up as a fintech thesis, and it’s arguably why CNote reads less like a typical impact-investing pitch and more like infrastructure that was always going to get built by someone — she just made sure it was built well.
CNote is a Certified B Corporation, GIIRS-rated, and based in Oakland. It’s not trying to be the next Schwab. It’s trying to prove that the parts of finance Wall Street doesn’t bother with are exactly where the next decade of impact — and, per its own results, real yield — actually lives.