Buko Ventures invests in Vini

We’re excited to announce our investment in Vini, a new investing platform for personal investors in the Philippines.

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Vini’s founder and CEO Michael Tan has worked in the Philippines capital markets as an equity broker for almost 10 years. He knows the local market well and also knows first-hand that the current tools available for local investors are generally limited and outdated, especially in comparison to the friendly tools and interfaces on chat apps, e-commerce websites, and even on modern banking apps in the Philippines.

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In the US and Europe we’ve seen breakout successes in this space with companies like RobinHood, etoro, and others. In Southeast Asia we’ve also seen big local successes with Pluang in Indonesia recently raising $55m in a Series B led by Accel Partners and already supporting over 3m customers. Vini is going after a similar opportunity here in the Philippines.

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Vini’s target market is the serious part-time investor. Professional financial Institutions get direct access to the brokers of equity trading desks at the major banks and generally use highly sophisticated trading software like Bloomberg or Reuters. At the micro-scale, Gcash has recently built some exciting but very basic investment tools in their Gcash “super app” that are primarily for casual investors making very small and simple investments.

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Vini sees a big opportunity in-between: offering serious but non-professional investors a powerful dashboard to make sophisticated investments and manage their investing portfolio in an intuitive interface. Vini targets investors that are managing portfolios of around 500,000 to 25m peso ($10,000-$500,000). As incomes continue to grow in the Philippines, this addressable market of small  to midsize personal investors is set to grow massively.

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Vini is partnered with an established licensed brokerage in the Philippines which eases the licensing requirements needed to grow the business. They have a synergistic relationship where Vini’s customer-friendly interface and custom tools will bring in a large customer base and transaction value that will grow the trading volumes of Vini’s broker partner.

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In their first couple months of beta-operations, Vini already has a solid base of active users and millions of pesos in total AUM already in the system (AUM = Assets Under Management, although to be clear, with Vini all investment decisions are up to the users).

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We’re excited to support Michael and his team with Vini. We are big believers in the power of investing and we are excited to help enable powerful investing tools to help democratize access to financial success and wealth accumulation for the growing middle class of the Philippines.

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If you are interested to learn more about Vini and their personal investing tools, you can visit their website: Vini.ph.

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