Portfolio Review: GIMO - Making Lives Better

At that time, GIMO was at the pre-product stage. It was early, even for our accelerator program. But the idea of EWA (earned wage access) excited us. With our experiences in financial services, we knew this could be big. Not only supporting the employees with their paycheck, managing their day-to-day spending, EWA can also be beneficial for employers, increasing employee's satisfaction and retention. In other markets, EWA has become a key recruiting tool for employers to attract talents.

EWA is not a new idea. But localization makes all the differences. From the product feature, communication to go-to-market strategy, GIMO team demonstrated a deep understanding of the local market and their customers, fueling the 130% monthly growth in the past few months.

We often ask ourselves one simple question when investing: "If we invest in this company, will this company make people's lives better?". We invest in companies that create values for the community, using technology to improve lives, to create a more inclusive environment and make this world a better place. That’s how we define impact investing. For us, successful founders are the ones who dare to challenge the ordinary, ask the most basic, fundamental questions that we often take for granted. We saw that in Quan and Ngoc and we took the bet, over a year ago.

Today, we are happy that Integra Partners, Resolution Ventures, Blauwpark Partners and TNB Aura VN Scout all share the same vision with us and participate in the fundraising round of GIMO. This new investment, along with the investors' experiences in the field will help GIMO achieve new milestones in the upcoming months. We are also excited that this is the first investment of Integra, Resolution and Blauwpark in Vietnam, opening doors to many other investments in the country and moving our startup ecosystem forward.

* For more details of GIMO's latesting funding round, please read this article.

Chelsea Nguyen - Investment Manager, ThinkZone Ventures.