Entirely by accident, Mart Vainu became a high school teacher in Estonia.
In 2019, Vainu was shopping for a mortgage with his then-girlfriend, now his wife, and bumped into a childhood principal. He jokingly complained about wishing someone had taught him how to find a mortgage in high school. Later that day, the teacher emailed Vainu and asked him to teach the subject.
“There’s so much content out there, like videos and courses and books, but it doesn’t matter because nobody’s consuming it,” Vainu said, referring to students and financial education. “... That’s when I realized that we needed to make finance more fun.”
The experience set Vainu on a path to becoming a volunteer teacher and eventually founding Cashy, an educational platform that partners with credit unions to teach financial literacy to children. The app has attracted thousands of users and is the reason Vainu moved from Estonia to Tampa in October to join Embarc Collective.
Cashy is an online simulation game where students learn from financial decisions like saving or investing. It makes money by selling native advertising spaces, or co-branding, to credit unions. There are no video ads or ad walls, but branded content appears throughout the game.
The app allows credit unions to inform potential customers of the business.
“That’s the main premise of what we help them do; we help them get younger customers, younger members because that’s what they need,” Vainu said.
The app launched in 2022, and 150,000 people in total have played Cashy since launching. It has 15,000 monthly users and contracts with five credit unions in three states. It also contracts with Swedbank, one of the largest banks in Sweden, according to Statista.
In 2022, Cashy raised an undisclosed amount from several angel investors, including Martin Vilig, the co-founder of European unicorn Bolt. Cashy is now focused on growing, and Vainu eventually hopes to close another angel investor round.
Vainu is a self-taught entrepreneur. He learned how to launch his first company in high school. It sold chocolate trivia — a customizable game for corporations with questions printed on the candy. The company slowly shuttered as his focus went elsewhere, but it garnered enough passive income to help Vainu later launch Cashy, he said.
While serving his required time in the Estonian military and performing lookout shifts at 2 a.m., he remembers using the spare time to grow the chocolate trivia business and learn about finance, he said.
Vainu discovered Tampa and the Embarc Collective while using ChatGPT. The bot answered his questions about the best places to grow a business by listing Embarc Collective. Noticing Tampa, he contacted Allie Felix, the vice president of platform at Embarc, and soon he was apartment hunting.
He chose Tampa over Miami or cities in Wisconsin, where three of his business contracts are, because of the welcoming and varied business community, he said.
“I came here to build a business, and what I saw in Tampa and Embarc specifically is, first of all, we need to hire new people, and we heard that Tampa has startup talent; it’s growing,” Vainu said.
Tampa might not be his forever home, as he gave up his life, friends and family to move here, but it’s a strong place to grow his business for the next few years, he said.
