30 BCBUSINESS NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2020
When his business thrived
thanks to
COVID-19, Marc Kuo
made sure he gave back as
much as he gained.
Vancouver-based delivery
optimizer Routific, which Kuo
founded in 2015, started taking
off in tandem with the pan-
demic, ballooning from about
500 clients globally in early
March to more than 1,000 in
September. So the company
took on even more business,
in the form of free service to
some 450 nonprofits across
North America, helping deliver
meals, medicine, masks,
school supplies and every-
thing else. Originally from the
Netherlands, Kuo wrote his
L O G I S T I C S
Route C ause
Routific founder Marc Kuo
University of Rotterdam mas-
ter's thesis in economics on
route optimization algorithms
before meeting his now-wife, a
Canadian expat, in China and
moving to her home country.
"At least in theory, I had built a
prototype of an algorithm that
would create routes 40-per-
cent shorter than any human
route planner designed,"
recalls the Routific
CEO, who
based his research on the
behaviour of honeybees.
"As a collective, honeybees
are able to find the shortest
path between flower pads,"
Kuo explains. "At first, they'll
randomly fly a particular
direction and then go onto
some paths to flowers. They'll
come back to the hive and do a
bit of a waggle dance to attract
the attention of the other bees,
