Vimba – NEM Ventures First Portfolio Investment

It gives us great pleasure to announce that NEM Ventures has now made its first investment in a portfolio company – Vimba.

Join the discussion on the NEM Forums!

We would like to thank the community for the patience and support to get to this position and the team at Vimba for working collaboratively while NEM Ventures was incorporated in parallel.

Vimba are an innovative and established company that provide three primary services:

• Regular monthly savings allow customers to automatically save FIAT from a bank account and have crypto delivered to their wallet.
• Instant Buy & Instant Sell allows customers to purchase crypto via ad-hoc bank transfer of FIAT into crypto using integration with banking networks and crypto exchanges

“NEM is a quality community driven project, run by the people for the people, which aligns with the ethos at Vimba. The investment is going to enable Vimba to grow into new regions, develop the platform further, providing a safe and trusted gateway to the new economy.”,
Sam Blackmore , Founder and CEO of Vimba.

Sam has provided a video for the community with a short overview of who Vimba are, where they have come from and where they are going:

These two services are the beginning of a larger vision to build a crypto-first banking model which is able to offer all the services you expect from a FIAT bank, in the crypto world. That could encompass earning interest on savings, collateralized debt, stable coins, loans etc.

Based in Auckland, New Zealand, they have ~6k customers and recently expanded into the UK as the first service to allow immediate FIAT to Crypto deposits via the core UK banking network; beating even Coinbase. Vimba have partnerships and plans in place to enter the Australian market in 2019, followed by other European markets shortly after.

Vimba already offers a unique and proven FIAT on/off ramp for BTC and ETH right now, with existing monthly revenues and a platform that is ready to scale. They are well advanced with integrating XEM into the platform and expect to launch this by the end of Q2 2019. Integrations are already present with Binance and the dev team are working through the automated creation of NEM wallets to which customers hold their own keys, along with the final stages of the UK banking network integration.

Vimba started in 2014 and has weathered both Bull and Bear markets, even outperforming some of the larger services in the market during the current Crypto Winter. This investment represents NEM Ventures recognition of the vision and value Vimba brings to providing a FIAT on/off ramp for the NEM community and a commercially viable enterprise. The investment provides sufficient runway to enable those scaling plans to really kick in.

The growth of Vimba to date has been a combination of investment from the founder, backing from the New Zealand government and seed investment + capital market guidance from Techemy Capital. These partnerships provide further depth and credibility upon what is already a solid foundation built by Sam and the team.

NEM Ventures have invested $0.5m as a convertible note, the funds will be released in 2 tranches over the next 4-6 months. Vimba will hold ~10% of the investment as XEM in their treasury to support ongoing operations, alongside their existing ETH and BTC holdings. This approach was taken to give Vimba the certainty required for runway whilst scaling and manage the flow of funds over a period of time. The convertible note manages the investor protections and conversion points to coincide with planned scaling and subsequent investment rounds.

NEM Ventures encourage everyone in the community to check out Vimba, and for those in the markets they are already operating in – why not open an account and see how it works? For those in the other markets – they will be with you as soon as they can!

We are organising the translation of this information in the next few days and will share additional updates wherever possible. We are also co-ordinating with Vimba and Techemy to publicise these announcements beyond the NEM Community so look out for further PR in the coming days