With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1388249
FROM TOP: CONSTANTIN WAHLE; BLRRD CREATIV JULY/AUGUST 2021 BCBUSINESS 55 H A R S H R A T H O D AGE: 29 Co-founder + CEO Niricson Software LIFE STORY: Harsh Rathod was working toward a PhD in civil engineering at UVic in 2016 when he learned that a bridge on the busy Mumbai-Goa highway that some of his family members often used had collapsed, killing almost 30 people. Fortunately, his relatives were unharmed. But that disaster changed everything for Rathod, whose doctoral work focused on using robotics and computer vision to assess the condition of dams, bridges and other infrastructure. "I was doing research to address this exact issue," he recalls. Rathod hadn't thought about business applications for his work, which aimed to replace antiquated techniques. Even today, inspectors typically climb a structure and hit it with a hammer to check the concrete. "We're still using 18th-, 19th-century methods," says Rathod, who came to B.C. from India in 2014. Over the next several years, he developed drone-based soft- ware that makes infrastructure inspections faster, cheaper, safer and more accurate–and uses signal processing to detect sub- surface damage. Rathod created a business plan, too. "I was a geeky researcher, and I literally had to transform myself." Luckily, he had some role models. His mother's side of the family works in real estate, and Rathod's father and his four brothers, who supply auto parts to the Indian Army, built their business from scratch. When Rathod co-founded Niricson in 2020, the year after he finished his PhD, the company was accepted into the prestigious Techstars-Arcadis accelerator in the Netherlands. It also landed several dam inspection contracts with BC Hydro and Power Authority. Niricson, whose name means "inspection" or "detailed investigation" in Sanskrit, is a data analytics business, Rathod explains. Rather than fly drones itself, it contracts out that work or helps clients set up their own programs. "We basically enable them to collect proper data using our technology," says Rathod, who sees a huge potential market. BOTTOM LINE : Now working with other utilities and building a software-as-a-service product, Niricson will have 10-plus multina- tional clients this year as it moves into bridges and tunnels, too. The 16-employee company is also pursu- ing more capital after raising about $800,000 in 2020. –N.R. 3 0 U N D E R T H I R T Y S E L E N E D I O R AGE: 23 Founder + CEO Vitae Apparel LIFE STORY: Selene Dior was born in China, but she moved with her mother to Richmond when she was 10 months old. The pair stayed in Canada for five years, with Dior's mom working two or three jobs and getting the landlord to check in on her at night. When she was six, her family decided to head back to China, only to return when Dior was in Grade 10 because her mother wanted her to attend university here. Dior had other plans. She had swam competitively in China, and although her family didn't have the funds to keep her in the sport, she became a lifeguard and quickly identi- fied an issue. "I would see so many women in the summer come off the slides and diving board, and their bikini top would fall off," she remembers. "It was embarrassing for them, and it happened all the time." She began designing swimwear and looking into manufacturing– something helped by her time in China and fluency in Mandarin and Cantonese. She launched Vitae Apparel–named for the Latin word for life–in December 2016 while she was studying for her first-year finals. Dior dropped out of school ("my mom was pissed," she laughs) to focus all of her efforts on the company, pivot- ing it to athletic wear in 2018. BOTTOM LINE : "Community has been the biggest factor of our success," says Dior, noting that Richmond-based e-tailer Vitae now has 15 employees and blew past $1 million in revenue in 2020. "They love our brand, what we stand for, what we do, the fact that we're transparent. We have a 40-percent customer return rate–that's pretty high for a clothing brand." –N.C. Harsh Rathod Selene Dior