Umaimah Mendhro (oo-my-ma mend-ro) is one of the few entrepreneurs who can say she won funding on her first pitch. It sounds like a lucky break, but she’s been piecing together an ambitious plan since childhood.
Mendhro’s earliest memory is wanting to build and lead a large, multi-national company. Harvard also figured prominently in her childhood aspirations, even in the face of geographic disadvantages.
“Coming from part of the world, and specifically part of Pakistan, where I didn’t have schools around, I grew up with the idea of building my own path… Because of that, education became something I was truly passionate about,” she explains.
Mendhro eventually made it to Harvard, earning an MBA in 2009. Five years later, connections she met there, and during a career stop at Microsoft, helped her win that first funding pitch. Those contacts, who had become general partners at Google Ventures (now GV), agreed to lead a $1.3 million seed round to fund VIDA, Mendhro’s apparel startup.
VIDA is a site where select artists can upload designs for custom shirts, scarves and other merchandise. The platform is built to accommodate all types of creatives: photographers, painters, sculptors, calligraphers and more. (The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is using it to print artwork from its collection on apparel.) Customers buy pieces online, and the creators get a 10% revenue share. VIDA is for-profit, but also has a social mission: It offers literacy training to the factory workers who make the products.
VIDA prints artists’ custom designs on apparel
When she pitched Google Ventures, Mendhro had done a lot of groundwork already: she researched over 500 artists, visited dozens of factories, interviewed customers across the country, calculated her margins and built an early prototype for her website.
VIDA incorporated as soon as it got the Google Ventures check, in April 2014. With that money, Mendhro developed the line – selecting a diverse set of artists and ensuring her operations were ready to grow quickly. “It was important to me upfront that it was a fiercely streamlined manufacturing process, because once we get that right, we can scale the business. We didn’t want a complex ecosystem.”
Since her November 2014 launch, Mendhro has managed to expand product offerings 1000x. Artists hail from over 150 countries and over 2,500 cities around the world. She built a 30x growth in revenue between January 2015 and April 2016. That growth is part of why Mendhro thinks VIDA is ready for another round of funding. She sees opportunities “every day” to do more, if she had the resources to grow the team and technology as big as her vision.
To start looking for that next round, Mendhro participated in the Google for Entrepreneurs Demo Day last week. The invitation-only event convenes North American startups and gives them the opportunity to pitch investors and network with mentors. Steve Case, who attended, announced that he will invest $100,000 in any of the startups that raise $1 million in the 100 days following the event. That means August 12th is the deadline to get the AOL cofounder and notable investor on board.
No surprise, Mendhro is already on her way to meeting Case’s challenge. Following her 5-minute pitch explaining VIDA’s mission, team and traction, she scored a deal with one Demo Day investor and has meetings with several more scheduled for the coming weeks.
Even if Mendhro has a great network, she was grateful for the opportunity to pitch so many people at once, saying, “For anyone to come into Silicon Valley and get an audience like that, even for us, that would take months to schedule.”
This post was originally published on: Forbes.
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