Vimma

Vimma (Vimma Ltd.) is a London, UK-based marketing technology company operating an AI-assisted consumer advocacy platform. The software lets brands connect with their own customers and with "nano-influencers" — ordinary consumers who are active on social media — and incentivise them to post product recommendations, allowing a brand to engage hundreds or thousands of individuals at once and reach a far larger audience indirectly. The company frames this as an alternative to display advertising, citing consumer ad fatigue, roughly 20% ad-blocker penetration with about 30% year-on-year growth in ad-blocking, and the concentration of about 60% of digital advertising in the hands of Google and Facebook.

The product is described as a deep-context SaaS layer that analyses existing social media content and matches it to brands, effectively converting individual social profiles and posts into purchasable advertisement space. Beyond campaign delivery, Vimma built automation to detect and contact suitable brands on social media for sales targeting, and to identify and match consumer advocates who are not yet platform users to existing brand campaigns against detailed specifications. A Gust profile lists the company at prototype-ready stage in the marketing/advertising industry, incorporated in July 2018, reporting in GBP.

Founding story

Co-founder Outi Pietilanaho developed the idea while running her own cosmetics e-commerce brand, where she chose to encourage customers to talk about and review her products on social media instead of buying conventional ads and found word-of-mouth outperformed other channels. She started the company in 2018 with her technical co-founder Mykhailo Loginov to build software that leverages the voices of regular consumers.

Business model

Vimma sells software to brands that want product recommendations placed on the social media profiles of consumers and nano-influencers; consumers on the platform are incentivised to create and publish those recommendations. The company positions the offering as SaaS analysing existing social content and converting posts into ad placements. Brand customers have been acquired chiefly through traditional B2B software sales.

Marketers buy advertisement space on individuals' social media profiles through the platform; the company describes its technology as a SaaS product sold business-to-business.

Traction

As of the Leapfunder interview, Vimma reported about 1,000 people using the platform daily and roughly 20 brand customers, with a stated goal of growing those figures tenfold within the year. The team had grown from the two founders to seven people.

Latest developments

Vimma was filling a funding round on Leapfunder intended to expand its user base, while prioritising automation of onboarding and of brand prospecting to accelerate growth.