https://vimeo.com/718147606

Aggregate gig workers’ financial data using AI

What is your company going to make?
We're making an AI-powered platform to help informal workers to build their financial profiles and businesses to reach an untapped market segment. We're the Credit Karma kind for independent workers in ASEAN and LATAM.

Please describe your product and what it does or will do.

Our AI assistant, PawLee, supports 1,000 food delivery riders and car drivers daily in Singapore and Malaysia. We're expanding our reach to logistics drivers and other on-demand gig workers. We help them consolidate their multiple income sources in a single platform. This enables access to working capital through overdrafts, allowing it to cover essential weekly expenses like fuel, vehicle upkeep, and additional job-related costs. We empower our members with customized information and powerful tools to make confident financial decisions, regardless of their unique situations or current stage on their financial journey.

If you want to learn more about the product, please read the following:

Our entry product is a chatbot named "PawLee," which provides daily support to gig workers to help them earn more while working with the platforms. Since incorporation, we have made US$ 220,000 by providing analytics to food delivery platforms in Singapore and Malaysia. During the second quarter of 2023, we will also offer capital in advance to the workers by partnering with low-tech micro-finance institutions and petrol stations. Capital will be delivered through vouchers on top of discounts and group benefits, avoiding direct money transfers to the workers.
In addition to our chatbot and acting as a retainer, in the third quarter of 2023, we plan to develop an application that will enlarge the user experience for workers with additional features, such as an income and expenses tracker, alternative scoring, financial planning tools, financial health tools, and access to other financial services offered by multiple financial institutions, sellers, service providers, and other players in the supply chain. We aim to provide gig workers with a comprehensive financial platform that helps them manage their finances more efficiently and effectively, creating trust and long-term relationships with them.

By the end of 2023, we are expecting to hit 100,000 active users. As users share their financial information with us, we will expand our partnerships and the product and services portfolio at more competitive pricing. Our cross-selling strategy consolidates our product, making it a robust business model in which we keep expanding the data monetization in the shape of fees and commissions on the referred services and products.

Singapore

Na

How long have the founders known one another, and how did you meet?
Marian Prieto and Maria Hoyos have been working together for seven years. They first met while working on the same team at Fundacion Capital. Recently they met Ashok Jaiswal six months ago through the YC matching tool and have been working together since then.

Have any of the founders not met in person?
All three of them are full-time founders who have met in person twice within the last six months, as they are a remote team. Ashok Jaiswal is based in Hong Kong (soon moving to Singapore), Marian Prieto is in New Zealand, and Maria Hoyos is in Singapore.

How far along are you?
Our organization, GoNsave, has clearly defined our mission and vision. Our mission is to assist informal workers in building their financial profiles one day at a time by consolidating their multiple financial records in one place so they can access cheaper financial services. Our vision is to become the world's leading financial application for informal workers.

Our platform caters to the global market of over 300 million informal workers. Our journey began by offering gig workers extra earnings in exchange for their data. Looking into options to sustain our business while growing, we started early data monetization by selling real-time market reports to food delivery platforms in Singapore and Malaysia. Since our incorporation, we have earned a cumulative revenue of US$220k, translating to an US$18k monthly recurrent rate.

Along with early monetization, while collecting 1 million data points, we discovered that if workers' income is irregular, they tend to enter into a vicious cycle in which their income decreases over time. Since workers invest almost half of their income while performing their job, any alteration in their income will impact their further earnings because of the lack of capital to leverage their work. This often leads to an unsuccessful hopping trend between gig platforms, leading to blaming the gig work model and damaging their access to financial services.

Therefore, we are raising funds to accelerate the enhancement of our minimum viable product (MVP) and become a daily-use platform for workers and a long-term partner for financial institutions, sellers, and supply chain stakeholders. We aim to become a significant player in this nascent US$380B global financial industry by making our stake through commissions and fees. Reaching one million active users is an opportunity for eight figures in revenue over time.

How long have each of you been working on this? How much of that has been full-time? Please explain.

Maria HOYOS - Oct 2021 full-time
Ashok JAISWAL - Oct 2022 Part-time. He joined full-time in February 2023
Marian PRIETO - Oct 2022 Part-time. She will join us full-time from April 2023 onwards.

How many active users or customers do you have?

USERS B2C
We have 3,000 registered users (independent workers) in our chatbot
Active users 1,106 sharing information in exchange for money

CLIENTS B2B (Current monetization model)
We have 2 food delivery platforms paying a monthly recurrent fee of ~ US$ 9,000. We have signed contracts for 12 months with auto-renewal clauses.

Anything else you would like us to know regarding your revenue or growth rate?

In Oct 2021, we were making US$ 5,100 monthly in Singapore
In May 2022, we expanded our services, making US$ 10,800 monthly
In Oct 2022, we extended our services to Malaysia, and our revenue grew to US$18,000. This 3.4x growth is an example of our capacity to execute and grow.

Na

We're part of Tenity (former f10) 5 Singapore Batch. We're part of their incubation program, and we received a US$ 52,000 investment from them in March 2023

Why did you pick this idea to work on?
We chose this idea because it has the potential to positively impact people's lives and unlock significant value through leveraging data to acquire untapped market segments at lower costs. With the potential to generate up to 380B annually for banks and save up to 50% of acquisition costs through personalized services, we believe this is a business idea worth pursuing. The ways of working are changing more after COVID, which transforms how we live and bank. Thus, we connect our expertise in financial inclusion with ways of working today, jobs based on immediate demand.

How do you know people need what you're making?
Based on the comprehensive data we have collected, comprising more than 1 million data points tracking food delivery and car drivers in Singapore and Malaysia, we can confirm that their income is highly variable. Our accumulated knowledge suggests that there are two primary reasons for this trend. Firstly, workers often spend approximately 50% of their earnings on the job. Since they are typically paid weekly or bi-weekly, they must invest their funds strategically to meet their financial goals. Their gains could be significantly reduced or nonexistent if they lack the resources to purchase essentials like petrol during a particular week. Secondly, incentive programs are often challenging to navigate due to dynamic pricing, which means that drivers do not earn the same amount per order or ride. Numerous factors influence this variability, and securing a stable income over time is impossible without a comprehensive understanding of these dynamics.

Currently, there are approximately 650 million gig workers globally, with around 50% being skilled freelancers in higher income streams who typically have access to financial services or, at the very least, available data to prove their financial identity. The other half of the gig workers, whom we are targeting, are referred to as location-based gig workers. They perform on-demand work using their phones to offer low-entry services such as delivery, driving, cleaning, and tasking. Due to the informal nature of their income, they are typically excluded or underserved by financial institutions.

We identified an opportunity to create an easily scalable business by unlocking access to this market segment's data and connecting them with services and products in a single location, reducing costs for all industry players.

Do you have domain expertise in this area?
Maria Hoyos- I have extensive experience spanning over 12 years working in the financial industry, with a particular focus on Fintech, Financial Inclusion and Microfinance. Throughout my work, I noticed an intersection between the growing trend of gig work and the lack of access to financial services.

Marian Prieto is a former founder. She holds ten years of experience in project management, developing and operating digital financial solutions for the low-income and low-literacy population. She is a Chevening scholar, Social and Digital Transformation getting an MSc in International Development Management from the University of Manchester.

We're different because we understand we must be present in every worker's day. Our approach to financial services is highly co-related to helping our users to reach their income potential while working as on-demand workers.

Our features are designed for everyday use, so users have to interact with our technology daily, seeing us as their end-to-end service to increase their income and manage their personal finances.

Who are your competitors?
Super apps trying to capture value from their fleet and solve their financial problems
ASEAN
- Grab Financial Group offers loans and insurance products to its food delivery riders and driver-partners.
- Gojek Financial Services offers personal loans, working capital loans, and insurance to its driver-partners and micro-entrepreneurs.
- Didi Chuxing offers a range of financial services, including car loans, insurance, and leasing programs, to its driver-partners in the region
LATAM
- RappiPay offers a digital wallet that enables its delivery riders and customers to make payments, transfer money, and access other financial services.

Financial Inclusion Fintechs Targeting Gig Workers
ASEAN
- Advance a Digital platform providing salary on-demand to workers in the Philippines.
- Gigacover insurance for the gig economy
LATAM
- Lana is a technology platform for Gig Economy workers that operates as a financial marketplace in LATAM
UNITED STATES
- Moves manages money, offering access to cash advances, and earn free stock ownership in the gig companies you work for
AFRICA
Moove offers workers the possibility to acquire their property vehicle to work with ride-hailing platforms

What do you understand about your business that they don't?

- Super apps like Grab or Rappi don’t understand how to gain workers' trust. The brand is associated with work hassles, and workers dismiss building long-term relationships with them.
- Super apps don’t have a comprehensive knowledge of workers' income. They have access to their data. According to our survey, 80% of the workers work with at least 2 platforms or have additional work.
- Platforms offering EWA don’t understand independent workers. Usually, they mainly work with blue-collar employers who can secure the loan with the workers' salary.
- Neobanks or licenced lenders like Mooves or Moves, need to raise money to lend from their balance sheet. Instead, we believe in data aggregation's power to act as an enabler so money supply is always available and rates are more competitive.
5. Our personalized approach offers financial solutions based on increasing workers' income, creating a long-term relationship with the users and becoming a tool needed to increase their income and savings.

How do or will you make money?
1. Monetization from embedded financial services and products
We estimate we will generate between US$30 and US$50 (annually) in revenue per user from the commission and pay-as-you-go fees

Our Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) estimated size is ~1,17 billion USD, which accounts for 39 million location-based independent contractors multiplied by ~US$ 30 annual revenue per user.

We expect to reach 39 million location-based independent contractors, 30% of ASEAN and LATAM's 130 million low-skilled workers. According to our internal surveys and research, this 30% mixes free agents, casual earners, and Provisional and Financial Strapped Contractors. Being free agents and financially strapped is the most common among low-skilled workers.

39 million workers x 30 annual revenue per user = US$ 1,17 billion

2. Real-time analytics (early monetization to fuel growth)
We estimate we will generate US$ 6,000 per city in which our client platform has a presence.

In the short term, our Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) targets 4 out of the 15 platforms in LATAM and 10 out of the 30 platforms in ASEAN. These platforms were selected based on their presence, where Go N Save Pte Ltd plans to expand operations, market leadership, and readily available channels to acquire them as customers. Each platform operates in multiple cities; for example, foodpanda, grab, rappi, lalamove, ninja van, and Gojek operate in ~22 cities approx.

Based on the geographical reach of our target platforms, we estimate our SOM at US$ 22 million.

14 Platforms x 22 cities x 6,000 monthly fee x 12 = US$ 22 million

Go N Save Pte Ltd

(Advisor) - 1%
(Advisor) - 1%
Ashok Jaiswal - CTO - 30.3%
Maria Antonia Hoyos - CEO - 43%
Maria Andrea Prieto - COO - 24.7%

Founders have agreed on a 12.58% dilution for ESOP.

Convertible loan
Principal: US$ 52,000
03/03/2023

SAFE valuation cap
US$ 50,000
09/06/2022

Rasing
Investment of USD 1,5M
24-month runway
Two tranches
1st 500 USD Convertible
2nd 1M USD Priced Round, strategic values investor(s), Secure lead investor by late Q3, 2023

The current revenue is helping us to smooth the growing costs. However, we want to secure 24 months of operations to accelerate our sustainable growth.

Yes

Who writes code or does other technical work on your product?
Our co-founder and CTO, Ashok Jaiswal has been building tech products for the last 15 years for startups and corporations like Goldman Sachs and Cathay Pacific. Our COO, Marian Prieto, and I (Maria Hoyos) collaborate on the problem and need identification using the ABT framework approach. We work together on the definition of the product specifications and design. Ashok takes complete control of product development. We again help with launch and product support.

We work on a sprint basis coordinating our milestones and deadlines.

More information about Ashok:
Ashok has been passionate about problem-solving from a young age, which eventually led him to pursue a career in software engineering. Throughout his 15-year professional journey, he has tackled many challenges and accomplished many feats.

In 2009, he created a peer-to-peer multi-party video conferencing plugin for internet browsers. Skype was the only video call solution then, and it was limited to only two-party conferences. This solution provided users an alternative means of conducting video conferences with more than two participants.

In 2018, he designed and built the world's first IoT pod-based yoghurt maker, similar to the famous "Nespresso" coffee maker. This device enabled users to make fresh yoghurt at home for a fraction of the cost of supermarket yoghurt.

Was any of it done by a non-founder? Please explain
Before Ashok's incorporation into the team, we developed our MVP product with a company owned by our angel investor. Ashok is managing that team now, and all the new code is being developed by him or under his supervision.

Deep tech solution so humans in developing countries can control robots in wealth markets to solve the increasing shortage of workers doing low-entry tasks such as warehouse logistics, last-mile delivery and others.

Na

Jonas Thuerig - Tenity https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonas-thuerig/
Aswin Andrison - Tenity https://www.linkedin.com/in/aandrison/

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