58 Million Millionaires – and Almost No Products Built for Them

01 /The Concept

EPTME had raised $5.8M back in January 2023, when the company was barely off the ground. It's still in waitlist mode before its official launch – yet it just pulled in another $24M in fresh funding.

Both rounds were led by the founder himself. That's the kind of thing that can raise eyebrows or inspire confidence, depending on how you look at it – but either way, it signals unusual conviction.

EPTME calls itself a "lifestyle management" service, claiming it will "transform the way people enjoy luxury services in the future."

The lifestyle umbrella covers physical and mental wellness, shopping, travel, dining, and participation in exclusive events.

The model is built around a closed-invite club. You don't just sign up – you need to be invited.

Members gain access to "lifestyle architects" – specialists who design bespoke plans for both individual and group experiences.

The startup even claims it can arrange space travel for its members.

Beyond the personal curation angle, EPTME leans hard into the community dimension – members can connect and socialize with one another.

The intended member profile is athletes, entrepreneurs, influencers, and people doing genuinely interesting things at the top of their fields. Membership pricing will presumably be high enough to screen out anyone who hasn't made it to that tier.

Online and offline interaction are both part of the package – the club will host regular invite-only gatherings.

The community's tagline: "meet the most ambitious people in the most extraordinary places."

Each member gets an app with a live feed of curated events to join, an online forum, and a place to request personalized trip planning and other services. Booking – tickets, hotels, excursions – is handled entirely by EPTME's team. The mission, as they put it: "We help you live more fully while worrying less about details, because we handle all of them."

02 /Why It Matters

The luxury club space has been warming up lately.

This summer, Essentialist ([related review](/review/millionery-popali-v-dyru)) suddenly raised $10M – surprising for a startup that had managed to attract only $1.5M over its first eight years. Essentialist also built a closed club for bespoke travel planning, charging $2,600 per person per year – not counting the cost of the trips themselves.

Yayem ([covered here](/review/kak-samim-zarabotat-na-top-5-zarabatyvajushhih)), founded in 2021, has raised $4.9M including its latest round last year. When it was reviewed previously, it positioned itself as a club for digital nomads; now it bills itself as a "closed community and platform for travelers, cosmopolitans, and the next generation of digital nomads." Membership includes an online community with interest-based subgroups, an AI matchmaking engine, a concierge travel service, offline events, and access to work and leisure spaces around the world through partner venues.

Earlier this year, Long Story Short ([covered here](/review/million-dollarov-v-god-tolko-dlja-nachala)) launched as a buyers' club. Its platform is a marketplace for exclusive items, with specialists who contact sellers, negotiate, verify authenticity, and arrange delivery. Membership: $1,000 per month – not per year, per month.

Back in 2021, another closed buyers' club launched: Myria ([related review](/review/paradoksalnaja-strategija-vyzhivanija)), a marketplace for "goods and services you can't Google." It raised $5.9M in 2022. Why it needed outside funding is genuinely puzzling – membership starts at $30,000 per month, which seems like more than enough to sustain itself.

As Myria puts it: "True success is more than money. Success is happiness. So successful people deserve to get more out of life. That's why we built Myria."

03 /Opportunities

The number of dollar millionaires in the world has quadrupled over the past 20 years. In 2023, there were at least 58 million of them globally.

By 2028, the US alone will have 25.4 million millionaires; the UK 4.5 million; Germany 3.2 million; France 3.3 million; Japan 3.6 million; Canada 2.4 million; Australia 2.3 million.

58 million people is a massive addressable audience. For scale: there are roughly 27 million software developers in the world. You can probably name a dozen developer-focused startups off the top of your head. How many startups built specifically for millionaires can you name?

Millionaires appear to be a dramatically underserved market – despite being one of the most capable of paying premium prices.

This gap has opened up over the past two decades. Twenty years ago, there were plenty of services and venues that catered specifically to the wealthy – because the income gap between rich and everyone else was sharp enough that anyone targeting high-ticket buyers focused on the upper crust.

Then the middle class emerged and grew substantially, and what used to be luxury quietly repositioned itself toward that larger, newly affluent market. The result: services that were once genuinely premium became, in practice, upper-middle-class services for upper-middle-class people.

The ultra-wealthy still inhabit their own orbit. But today's millionaires are mostly not "ultra-rich" – they're what you might call the affluent tier: above mass market, below true billionaire territory. Their expectations are qualitatively different from the mass middle class, but right now they fall into a gap between the two – which is exactly why they're underserved.

The opportunity, then, is building services and platforms purpose-built for this affluent tier.

As the startups mentioned here show, investor appetite for this space is picking up. The pattern that's worked: choose a specific high-value use case – bespoke travel, exclusive goods, concierge health – and build a closed community around it. The affluent tier doesn't want another mass-market product with a premium price tag; they want something that treats them as a distinct customer class.