Tumelo

**neovo** · January 20, 2019, 3:49pm

No great detail on the website, they just popped up on social media - paying for sponsored ads…

**saf** · January 20, 2019, 4:11pm

From their Twitter page

Invest. Be Positive. Create Change.
Invest from £5 into a personal, positive portfolio to give your money the potential to grow and change the world.

It’s sounds like a Robo Advisor focusing on Socially Responsible Investment to me.

edit - more details on https://medium.com/hedge-app/a-pitch-for-the-world-in-a-broken-elevator-cdc90248fe89

edit 2 - Tumelo is linked to, or owned by Hedge, see their Privacy policy:

**Rat_au_van** · January 20, 2019, 4:17pm

LinkedIn has a bit more

https://www.linkedin.com/company/tumelo

Signed up because

Edit: the first word hasn’t endeared them to me

**neovo** · January 20, 2019, 4:35pm

Yeah also signed up - check the competition and all that…

**neovo** · January 20, 2019, 10:28pm

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**HarryG** · January 22, 2019, 3:01pm

Sounds like Tickr, jumping on the ESG bandwagon !

**GStewart** · February 25, 2019, 3:00pm

Hey folks

Really great to see you talking about us! (We’ve been doing a bit of Facebook testing for the past 8 weeks so I guess that’s where you found us?).

We’re building a sustainable investing platform, yes, (we’ll be an advisor & build portfolios of equities & bonds based on your risk level & values) but our focus is actually on giving investors a voice at their companies (because we all have a right to one, the powers that be just make it super difficult right now, so we’re trying to change that).

I’ve just created our own Discourse page which I’d love for you to join, plus we have a blog on Medium if you want to learn more. We’ll be releasing a closed beta in March so if you’re keen to try it out then I would love to hear your feedback!

We’re literally just starting to find & grow our community so there isn’t much about us online. If you have any Q’s then just ask me anytime

Georgia

p.s. @Rat_au_van do you mean the “o’hello”? Our graphic designer used that once and it just stuck! We thought it was friendly but what are your thoughts?

**GStewart** · February 25, 2019, 2:58pm

Yes - we called ourselves Hedge when we first incorporated. Now called Tumelo but still need to change our name on Companies House. Waiting until the FCA process is over then will get straight to it as it’s super confusing!

**saf** · February 25, 2019, 3:01pm

Yeah no worries, what does Tumelo mean, or what’s the story behind the name? ( If there’s one )

I think I saw something about it being bootstrapped. If you did, how was that?

**GStewart** · February 25, 2019, 3:13pm

Tumelo means “good” or “faith”. At uni I was really involved in campaigning for Cambridge to invest their endowment more transparently & sustainably, so technically I’m from the environmental side first rather than finance… so we wanted to find a name that emphasised purpose .

We didn’t really bootstrap: we built software for about 6 months (got some free office space and waitressed nights & weekends) but then we raised a ‘pre-seed’ round about 6 months in, back in July, which allowed us to focus 100% & expand the dev team.

What do you think of the idea?

**saf** · February 25, 2019, 3:27pm

Cool, just Google’d this, South African, like Ubuntu.

Sounds kind of like bootstrapping it, not sure where the line is normally drawn though.

Sounds interesting. As I understand it Tumelo provides themed investments, with a activist element. Although not entirely sure how it all fits together, or how it will work. Probably need to see the see app first Do you have a video demo?

**dkeighobadi** · February 25, 2019, 5:57pm

What do you think of the idea?

I don’t know about anyone else but this has always been an aspiration for me with regards to investing; driving positive change through ownership. As you said its something thats ripe for disruption and I was wondering if you had been looking at platforms like say.com that have integration with brokerages, thereby increasing their effectiveness and reach, or will you only focus on building the platform around your own investing/advisory service?

**GStewart** · February 25, 2019, 6:22pm

Not yet, but if people think it would be useful then we can start working on one!

@dkeighobadi Yes! We’ve seen Say, really cool stuff and they are definitely thinking along the same lines as us. I’m not sure their angle is quite right though, at least our approach will be different - and aimed at people with less in-depth knowledge of shareholder rights etc.

We did start by looking at a stand alone shareholder engagement platform, but realised we needed investors to get the initial buy-in because most people don’t know what it means to be a shareholder in the first place (and fair enough because they make it so complicated…). We needed the education & marketing, and platforms like HL weren’t going to engage people for us if we just plugged into them because it’s more overhead. Hence why we’ve built an investment platform, so that we have that control. We’ll start by engaging our own members and really understanding a) how they want to engage/have influence and b) how the portfolio companies respond. Because that’s also key, otherwise it’s pointless.

As we learn we can build out a holistic engagement platform that connects all stakeholders to any company, maybe through plug ins to other brokers but that will depend on how people want to use it. We have a lot to learn over the next 6 months, that’s for sure, but it’s really exciting because the whole system is begging to be changed or updated, it’s so archaic and there is zero transparency!

**dkeighobadi** · February 25, 2019, 7:58pm

Thanks for the reply, wish you the best of luck!