Mowida – A Success Start-Up in Our US Talent to Sweden Program

Meet Meiju Vartiainen, founder and CEO of Mowida, and Yang Wang, a US young professional and current intern at Mowida. Mowida is an innovative company situated in Umeå, Sweden, using a customer-focused approach to develop a digital platform that helps property owners simplify their everyday lives as well as contribute to digitalization of the industry. Since 2019, the company is a part of the SACC-USA Talent Mobility Program.

Meiju Vartiainen, originally from Haparanda, Sweden, moved to Umeå to study business development and entrepreneurship. Umeå is a university city in the northern part of Sweden, and Meiju experienced the struggle of finding a student accommodation, despite two years of queuing. A look into various Facebook groups for housing in Umeå showed that she was not alone; many people addressed the same difficulties, some said that they had “tried everything” and that the situation was “hopeless.”

Driven by a strong will to help people out that are in a similar situation that she had been in, Meiju began doing research about possible student accommodations in Umeå and posted them in the Facebook group. She got a huge response and within a couple of months she ended up helping over 100 students to find a place to stay and got contacted by over 700 students.

Thus, there was a clear demand for a service that could provide housing contacts to people in Umeå. Meiju – being entrepreneurial by nature – realized that this service could be automated. She sat in her one-bedroom apartment and designed and created the first version of a digital platform for that purpose. This was six years ago, and since then, the work has been characterized by a culture of asking questions and learning. Instead of focusing on what a real estate system usually looks like, she chose to build a system from scratch that has the features that property owners in the area were looking for.

In the fall of 2020, Mowida launched its digital platform that brings together the entire functions of administration and rental of housing targeted for small and medium-sized companies. Today Mowida has customers in seven cities, and each city has between five and 2000 rentable objects. The journey has not always been smooth: Meiju worked eight jobs simultaneously to finance the first version which then also had to be revised to better meet the demands of the property owners. She realized that she needed to know what the owners were missing, and design a system that could meet, and even surpass, those expectations. She conducted numerous interviews with companies in the industry to create a relevant and user-friendly platform.

Over the years, the company has also moved from Mejiu’s one-bedroom apartment to a 140 square meter office in central Umeå. The team now consists of nine employees with five different nationalities and 50 % are women in the team, the board and the holding company. The environment is very international, and the multi-cultural team often engages in discussions during lunch breaks about their different backgrounds and experiences.

Yang Wang is Mowida’s second intern from the US. According to Yang, interning in Sweden has taught him more about working in start-up and meeting like-minded people who motivate him to potentially become an entrepreneur himself in the future.

“Working here have helped affirm to myself I enjoy software developing as a career and also inspired me to think more entrepreneurial in the future”, says Yang.

Meiju describes Yang as a very driven system developer, with deep knowledge and interest in the field. She believes that having a team member from the US has brought a new perspective to the company and also to the development of the product.

“We get to see the students grow as team members as well as individuals – what is there not to love about this concept? So far we have had two students from the US and everyone in the team has loved each and every minute spent with our new team member Yang. This is a unique opportunity that I did not want to miss.” Meiju Vartiainen, Mowida.

Källa: https://www.sacc-usa.org/mowida-a-success-start-up-in-our-us-talent-to-sweden-program/