Vili Created an Online Hypermarket to Support Georgian Farmers and Local Production
Vili became one of the winners of the second season of "Shark Tank". Vili is an online hypermarket platform, which managed to attract an investment of 143,000 GEL from "Sharks" - Keti Kvartskhava and Dachi Choladze.
The idea of creating Vili dates back to the early days of the pandemic when both people's daily lifestyles and consumer behavior changed. Mikheil Nemsitsveridze, the founder of the platform, and Lasha Sturua, the director, noticed that in the new lifestyle, the demand for out-of-home delivery of food and other basic necessities has increased. The need for new online supermarkets arose.
"That's why we decided to create an online space that would meet the existing challenges and at the same time make local natural products easily accessible to consumers. One of the goals of the idea development stage was to support Georgian farmers and sell their products. The name of the hypermarket came from the English word - Village. With this we wanted to emphasize the origin of Vili's products," says Lasha Sturua at Entrepreneur. The main activity of the company is an online hypermarket, which houses both everyday items and farm products, which include a total of more than 1,500 products.
It is noteworthy that Vili's team is staffed with qualified and motivated employees, and the founders are people in the fields of technology and business, such as Internet technologies, development, education (logic meter), and people with many years of experience in international shipping, which helps them in their current activities.
Today, Vili already has quite a lot of satisfied and loyal customers who, with the help of the company, have simplified the process of going shopping daily and entrusted the supply of products entirely to Vili. The business is still in the development stage, however, the startup is growing at a fast pace, and the number of customers is increasing daily and, consequently, the number of orders. At the same time, as the customer base grows, so does the demand for a variety of products, which is reflected in the rapid growth of Vili's range. As for the support of the "sharks" involved in the project, as Lasha notes, in addition to financial involvement, they received a lot of interesting advice from Keti and Dachi, which will help the business to grow even faster and develop in the right direction.
As the founders tell Entrepreneur, at this stage, Vili will supply products only throughout Tbilisi, however, with the onset of summer, the platform intends to increase its coverage area and also aims to service the surrounding summer cottages in Tbilisi. "In addition, we plan to open additional branches in Tbilisi, and at a later stage, to go and operate in all major cities across the country," - said the founders of Vili.
Source: Entrepreneur