Growing With The Rural Youth
Founded in 2015, MIMO is a Delhi-based startup that plays the dual role of skilling and employing semi-urban and rural youth. Through them, it provides a range of services to corporates. The startup has over 2,500 active field officers employed in 12 states. At present, it covers 6,500 unique pincodes and aims to cover all 19,000 unique pincodes of India by 2020.
Essentially, MIMO acts as a bridge between corporates and service providers looking to expand their reach to rural India and the rural youth looking for opportunities and bring them into the financial mainstream. It began the business with seed funding from the Chand Group and is now poised to raise additional funding. In Q2 and Q3 of 2018, MIMO crossed 3,00,000 transactions worth over Rs 5 crore. It has grossed over $6 million in transactional value since the MIMO app went live in October 2017. As of August 2018, MIMO was averaging $9,50,000 in gross transaction value per month.
Tech For Rural India
“All this has been achieved by the semi-urban and rural youth who have been given the opportunity to prove themselves,” says Regunathan.
MIMO is a for-profit enterprise that works on a business model wherein the field officer gets 80 per cent whilst MIMO receives 20 per cent of revenues earned on task completion. Revenue is earned through the established enterprise. The enterprise pays MIMO for every quality satisfied task and job executed by the MIMO field officer.
Through its platform, MIMO is also creating livelihood opportunities for rural youth. It keeps an eye on different regions across India where its services and products can be used to create micro jobs. “This enables all sections of society to become digitally aware and earn their source of income. This is a highly sustainable business model in the long term. We are a platform built to create social, economic and environmental change,” Regunathan asserts.
MIMO has introduced a set of technical user-friendly procedures where features like VAS, surveys, e-KYC collection and dispersal, form filling and field investigation, order fulfilment and demand generation are conducted for established enterprises across all verticals. This is conducted on a pan-India basis, with extensive focus on Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, districts and villages.
Beating The Odds
MIMO’s initial trials included identifying and being identified by funding agencies and venture capitalists and convincing corporates that the rural youth is equally capable of delivering results. It also had to showcase that working in the rural and semi urban market can be profitable. “I was keen to implement something, wherein more people could be a part of India’s financial inclusion agenda and become financially independent themselves,” says Regunathan.
