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September/October - Entrepreneur of the Year

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.

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SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 BCBUSINESS 61 BCBUSINESS.CA E N T R E P R E N E U R O F T H E Y E A R 2 0 2 1 20 21 built was inspiring," says Ben-Jaafar. "We could never have achieved the success we enjoyed had they not taken the risk to get the ball rolling with a bold yet viable vision. As impressive as their vision was, their disciplined commitment to execution is what truly sets them apart." Sanaie, who had planned to stay with Beanworks for a year after the acquisition, left in June to spend more time with his young family. He's now giving technical advice to first-time entrepreneurs, help- ing immigrant tech workers get settled by mentoring them through the Immigrant Ser- vices Society of BC and MOSAIC Vancouver—and looking to become an angel investor. "We wouldn't be here with- out the help of all these people that we met and all these com- munities that we ran across in our journey," Sanaie explains. "I'm trying to make it slightly easier to build a company in Vancouver." Approaching 100 employ- ees as of mid-August, Bean- works is in hiring mode. Being part of its parent company, which has 80 offices world- wide, will enable it to move beyond North America and become a global player, Dahl says. Describing Quadient as the Pitney Bowes of Europe, she points out that it leads its U.S. peer in the pivotal shift to digital mail. "So now we have them to leap off of, as well as the AR side, which was also where we were going to go next," she says. "The acquisition of Yay- Pay blended in with Beanworks allows us to be an AR/AP solu- tion, which speeds up all of our plans." –N.R. I S A N E N T R E P R E - N E U R B OR N OR M A DE ? I'm going to say born. I think it's a person- ality style –Catherine Dahl W H AT D O YOU D O T O R E L A X / U N W I N D ? Boating in coastal waters. So many things can go wrong when boating, so you have to be laser- focused when driv- ing. This way you get a chance to not think about other things in life and relax –Reza Sanaie W H AT O T H E R C A R E E R M IG H T YOU H AV E H A D ? I would have fol- lowed in my father's footsteps in the Navy, if women were allowed to be captains, which they weren't at the time –C.D. F U N FA C T S in Iran, Sanaie had moved to Vancouver with his family when he was 13 after teaching himself programming at 10. Having earned a computer engineering degree from SFU, he worked for the BC Cancer Agency and cybersecurity firm Sophos. Sanaie, who had always wanted to start his own company, quit the latter in 2012 to take a job at Amazon's Seattle headquarters—only to be turned back at the border several times and denied a work visa. Becoming a co-founder with Dahl, Cory Cleaver and Tracy Thompson that year was an ideal marriage, he says. "The product-market fit was there, which was something that I had always been chasing, and they were looking for someone to build it for them." Sanaie spearheaded the software- as-a-service (SaaS) platform's reinvention, becoming chief technology officer in 2017. "It was very hard to expand upon and scale up," he says of the original product. "We rebuilt it from scratch." At first, Beanworks' biggest fundraising hurdle was that revenue grew slowly because the founders used the money for research and development, Dahl says. Then they met local fintech investor Lance Tracey, a big contributor to their first seed round of about $1.6 million. In 2017, Beanworks brought on president and chief revenue officer Karim Ben-Jaafar. "He looked at the product and said, Wow, that'll sell itself; you just have to put it in front of the right person," Dahl remembers. "And so he pivoted our sales strategy and turned on our sales engine, and that made all the differ- ence in the world." Beanworks also raised $4.5 million in Series A funding from two Vancouver firms, TIMIA Capital and what is now Rhino Ventures. "From there, it just kind of took off," Dahl remembers. The company followed that in 2018 with a $10-million Series B round. The Beanworks platform automates the entire process of approving and paying invoices, integrating that ser- vice with a client's accounting software so there's no need for data entry. Given that accoun- tants are slow to embrace new technologies, the pandemic turned out to be a good thing for the company and for accounting in general, Dahl says. "Everybody got forced to go home, and accountants had no choice but to adopt technol- ogy," she notes. "So that extra few years it took us to be in development and launch our product, that's where the market caught up. I would say the first company was just too early." With two female and two male founders, Beanworks was also an early advocate of diversity and inclusion. Today, its staff hail from around the globe. "Catherine has been a big driver for the diversity movement from day one," Sanaie says. "It adds resilience to the company and brings a lot of other perspectives to each problem." Last year also saw Bean- works courted by Quadient, the France-based mail services giant. With France and other European countries mandat- ing that business-to-business invoicing go paperless in the next few years, Quadient needed to acquire an AP auto- mation platform, Dahl says. It bought Beanworks this March for more than $100 million, having previously purchased U.S. accounts receivable (AR) automation outfit YayPay. "Seeing what Catherine, Reza and their co-founders

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