Recently, it has seen the light first online learning community, socialization and entertainment for seniors. Vilma has the purpose of contributing to the improvement of well-being and quality of life of people over 55 years of age who want to learn new skills, stay physically and mentally active, and discover new experiences in a close and trusting environment.
In this way, the startup seeks to generate a positive social impact through its online community, empowering and connecting seniors with similar interests.
The company, founded in mid-2021 by Jon Balzategui (CEO) and Andreu Texido (COO)was born with a share capital of almost half a million euros and has the financial and strategic support of Antai Venture Builder.
Currently, the technology company is working on a financing round of around one million euros given the good reception during the first months. With this economic injection, and its business model based on monthly subscriptions, the startup plans to position itself as the reference platform for seniors in Spain, expand its team and deepen the diversification of its offer catalogue, as well as grow its community of users throughout 2022.
In less than four months since the official launch of the platform, the company has received more than 18,000 reservations for its classes, with an average of 14 students per class, and has more than 1,000 users attending classes in January, of which 25% have taken more than four classes during the month.
One of the strengths of the company is the great experience and knowledge of the sector of the founding team, since it has extensive experience in the field of digitization, innovation and technology in companies such as Badi, Edreams Odigeo and KPMG, which It has allowed them to apply it in Vilma to empower and connect seniors through their own online platform.
Likewise, the technology company has a team of nine permanent people specialized in marketing, software development, operations and education and, before the end of the year, it plans to complete the team with 12 more workers.
Senior Empowerment
Jon Balzategui, CEO and co-founder of Vilma, has stressed: “In a society where getting older becomes invisible, our goal at Vilma is to change the focus and empower seniors to enjoy active lives and achieve the best version of themselves. We are very happy with the reception we have had in the first few months, in 2022 we want to position ourselves as the leaders in Spain and start the internationalization of the company in the second half of the year.”
For his part, Andreu Texido, COO and also co-founder of Vilma, points out that “The differential value of our proposal is that the online community offers learning, entertainment and, in addition, also promotes socialization among seniors. The teachers are over 45 years old and we are seeing that very good dynamics are taking place between the users and the teachers. In addition, in many cases, we see that it is our own users who recommend Vilma to their friends, this being our main way to grow and make ourselves known”.
The company has a global vocation from the start, “We are talking about a huge market, in Europe there are more than 100 million people between the ages of 55 and 75, 1 in 4 Europeans belongs to this generation known as the baby boomers. In the following years we will see a lot of innovation in the edtech space and our goal in 5 years is to become the benchmark learning and wellness platform for seniors in Europe and Latam”adds Balzategui.
In the words of Miguel Vicente and Gerard Olivé, co-CEOs of Antai Venture Builder: “For Antai, Vilma represents a very attractive opportunity to expand our presence in the impact economy by addressing real problems in society, in this case the elderly population. We love that the project combines great potential for economic impact and social impact to improve the lives of older people. In addition, Vilma has the best entrepreneurial team to face this great opportunity.”
