Nomo, the digital telecom operator, attracts ex-Nextel

Digital operator founded by ex-Stone group has already raised BRL 17.5 million since the foundation of the startup

Nomo, a Brazilian startup founded two years ago by an ex-Stone group that dreamed of building a digital telecom operator, has just attracted two industry references. In an extension of the BRL 15 million round that it had already raised with Iporanga Ventures and names like Eli Horn and Guilherme Weege (Malwee), the company raised another BRL 1.5 million.

The amount changes little Nomo’s cash, which still held 60% of the round’s capital, but helped bring in Roberto Rittes, the executive who turned Nextel around and sold it to Claro for R$3.5 billion, and Yann Schuermans, who was one of the main names of Circles.Life — the Singapore digital telecom operator became the benchmark and received investments from funds such as Warburg Pincus and Sequoia.

“We left the tech area of ​​the financial market to innovate in telecom, a business that suffers from a lot of churn and complaints”, said Henrique Garrido, the young founder and CEO of Nomo. Inspired by the fintechs that disrupted the banking world, the startup wants to do the same with the cell phone account, improving the experience (and the traumas) of consumers who deal with traditional operators.

If payment institutions such as Nubank and fintechs C6 and Neon helped change the experience of customers with their digital accounts, Nomo is a digital operator that intends to replace traditional companies such as Vivo, Claro and TIM, says Garrido.

With an application, consumers can handle their cell phone account more easily, eliminating the bureaucracy of paying a bill every month. With the technology developed by Nomo, the cell phone account started to be paid like Netflix, charged monthly on the credit card.

According to Garrido, the consumers’ reception indicates that Nomo is on the right path. While traditional operators manage to present an NPS below 10, in the digital operator the customer satisfaction metric is above 80. At Circles.Life, a reference in this industry, the NPS is closer to 50%.

Nomo is still very small, with a few thousand customers — in Brazil, there are more than 220 million chips, which gives an idea of ​​the size of the market —, but it is betting on the customer experience to grow. “We grew 40% a month and 35% of our sales come from referrals”, stated Garrido, highlighting the power of word-of-mouth advertising in reducing the cost of acquiring customers.

To offer the service to customers, Nomo uses third-party infrastructure, in a commitment to the infrastructure neutrality model. Telecall, Vivo’s representative, is the partner that grants the use of antennas and towers to the startup. In terms of expansion, Nomo focuses its attention on the Southeast, the region with 80% of customers and, not surprisingly, where Vivo’s best signal is located. The startup has about 15,000 people on the waiting list.

In addition to the consumer-oriented operation, Nomo is preparing a BtoB vertical to take advantage of the technology it built — such as its own payment system — to offer to other telecom operators, such as regional broadband providers. The new vertical was inspired by Circles.Life, a digital operator that built a powerful area of ​​“technology for telecoms as a service”.

Nomo also wants to make a bigger round in 2023, possibly in the first half, to accelerate business growth.

Source: Pipeline Value