Vimba closing down operations

Announcements NEM Ventures
#1

It is a sad day today at Nem Ventures; Vimba, our first portfolio investment has had to announce by email to customers that they are closing.

At a practical level, any NEM community members who are customers, I advise you disable any future payments from your bank and download the transaction history for your own tax records. You should have received an email from Vimba this morning

The NEM Ventures team are now in the process of attempting to secure any recoverable assets possible on behalf of the community. As a result, at this time we are unable to comment further in public as there are ongoing liquidation/legal proceedings but will try to comment as/when we can do.

We know some of the community have had issues with NEM alignment of VImba in the past and we have ackowledged these, that we shared them and have tried to work with the founder(s) to try and resolve this. I can confirm no investment has been made after the original investment announcement.

It is the nature of investing in early stage companies that not all will succeed and grow, it is very unfortunate when this happens and unfortunately it is more likely to happen in the current macro environment. However each of those failures represent unrealised dreams, past hard work and investment etc for the teams involved as people as well.

We wish the Vimba team well with future endeavours and will update further when we are able/allowed to, these processes can take several months or even years to fully work through.

12 Likes
#2

Did you invest in it?
Don’t you have any investments?

1 Like
#3

Legal disclaimer: Information in this response is all public information, no private details are being released

Yes. It is not an equity investment, it is a Convertible Note which is a type of debt that becomes equity in a future fund raise.

NEM Ventures are a creditor (owed money) not a shareholder (own company shares).

The original announcement is here: Vimba - NEM Ventures First Portfolio Investment

3 Likes
#4

I went back to see it after this announcement.

1 Like
#5

Sad to hear.
LuxTag next?!
What’s the status with the other investments?

#6

Luxtag I believe are doing well, they are not a NEM Ventures portfolio company but everything I see publicly looks positive and they did a public fund raise a few months ago.

The status of the others is mostly on the forum with any updates that are public, the summary though is they are all progressing well, the changing of the date multiple times of Symbol launch has caused them challenges obviously but now the dates are firmer it makes it easier to plan. I will drop a few links below for the ones I can find easily:

The remaining ones that are publicly announced continue with good progress but the updates are largely private for now: TrackGood (formerly Origins), Techemy and CycleBit.

We have a few new investments to announce in the coming weeks as well but are finalising paperwork, public information etc

3 Likes
#7

That’s terrible news. They had such a useful product. I’d be curious to know what happened. I really want the service they were providing but it wasn’t available in any of my banking regions.

1 Like
#8

Why did you get involved with this company in the first place?
Nothing was contributed to the NEM.I had my doubts from the beginning.

And initially you thought my opinion was annoying, didn’t you?

#9

No offense.
My opinions are always serious.
I’m sorry I always write mean things.

5 Likes
#10

You are a good person, don’t worry.

3 Likes
#11

@kodtycoon @DaveH
I’ll ask again.
Why did you get involved with this company?

Why did you get involved in a company that would fail within two years?

#12

We’re still here :slight_smile:

1 Like
#13

No one is dodging questions, don’t worry. It was sent on a weekend (Sat morning our time) and coordinating Testnet took priority so I am just picking these up now (Monday morning). I would have posted the original thread this week if the timing was our choice, but Vimba emailed customers, some of who are in the NEM community so we wanted to provide information

The original investment thesis was to create a mechanism to regularly buy XEM (Dollar Cost Averaging or DCA), at the time there were very few or no major companies doing that for BTC or ETH, and none for XEM. The growth plans were to expand throughout Europe and Australia, then further. XEM was to be implemented equally to BTC + ETH.

At the time the Catapult road map (as it used to be), said launch approx 1 year ago today. The NV team were not involved at that time in the launch plan and had no more information than the community, we only got involved when the changes started to impact our portfolio companies. It was expected there would be more market demand for XEM as a result and Vimba would be a way for that demand to invest in ways that were not available at the time for NEM holders. So the features provided above would have been useful.

Now, 1.5 years later:

  • Vimba did not, in our view, deliver on the promises made at the time of investment, which @GodTanu, you and I have spoken about those failings before and we have tried to resolve the problem with Vimba, unsuccessfully. I can’t say more on this right now due to ongoing legal conversations.
  • Multiple companies have expanded into the DCA functionality including Coinbase, Binance and Revolut among others making competition much stronger in the same markets.
  • Covid happened during the time they were raising funds which has added to the difficulty in raising further investment, which was always planned when we invested.
  • Catapult was not delivered when expected so the market for Xem has been weaker than expected during the time, this was not a major issue, just stopped some xem adoption on Vimba

It is part of investing in early stage companies that some fail, however we try to support them as best as possible, ensure they deliver on promises to the NEM community and to limit the impacts of failure on NEM in general.

There will also always be projects that some people do not like, and some people do like. That is part of looking at companies across a broad range of sectors, geographies and stages of startup.

I have no problem with your opinions, they don’t annoy me and I don’t see them as mean, as long as they are respectful, as they are in this thread, I will always try and answer them.

On your question and failing within 2 years, Vimba actually did better than most and made it to 6 years, it is normal for an investment round that startups need more investment 1.5 - 2 years later to grow.

5 Likes