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/1501233
36 BCBUSINESS.CA JULY/AUGUST 2023 3 3 UNDER E N R I Q U E M O R A N - C O R A D O AGE: 23 Co-founder and CEO, Zeeno.ai LIFE STORY: According to Enrique Moran-Corado, moving to Canada from El Salvador was the best thing to happen to him. He didn't have access to internet until he turned 14, and at 15 he learned English and started freelancing. "I got the right tech skills, so I was doing a lot of shitty websites and designs, and even voice acting," he says with a laugh. Declining offers from Google and LinkedIn paid off for him. Not only is he the co-founder and CEO of the first ChatGPT-powered iPhone keyboard in the world, he's also a really fast coder. "I think it happened to be a Thursday that OpenAI released the API for everyone," he recalls. "We took that, submitted the changes to the Apple Store... and then on Saturday, we launched. In the entire world, we were number three on [curator site] Product Hunt." Moran-Corado met co-founders Sophie Berger and Callum Woznow while studying engineering at UBC. They launched Zeeno.ai months before graduating and got 5,000 users within the first week. He doesn't think AI and Chat GPT are fads, and as one of the first com- panies leveraging it, he's excited that Zeeno might have a say in the direction that these technologies will head. BOTTOM LINE : Like switch- ing languages on your phone, Zeeno is a keyboard extension that users can interact with directly. "You can type 'hello' and get a response from the AI," says Moran-Corado, whose business has tapped into a vertical called "conversational commerce for mobile-first businesses." Many small businesses running sales through, for example, WhatsApp or Instagram, don't have time to respond to messages. Zeeno users can search for products without ever leaving the chat. So far, Zeeno has garnered over 10,000 users and secured $840,000 in pre-seed funding from Silicon Valley-based startup accelerator Neo. –R.R. A N A S T A S I A K I K U AGE: 24 Co-founder and COO, Reusables LIFE STORY: At the age of 18, former professional ski racer Anasta- sia Kiku left her home in Russia for a life in Canada. "Up until that moment, I was racing 200 days out of the year," Kiku says. "I wanted to explore what else there was to life." She enrolled at UBC Sauder School of Business in Vancouver, where she studied operations and logistics. When she spent a semester abroad in Copenhagen, she became interested in sustainability—a concept that she says doesn't exist in the Russian language. Kiku returned to Vancouver inspired and landed an internship with Burnaby-based online grocery management system provider FoodX, where she focused on integrating a circular-economy model into the company's operations and logistics. When Kiku's internship ended, her former manager approached her with the idea of introducing a circular economy to the restaurant industry. Together, they founded Reusables, a company that helps food businesses implement zero-waste packaging. It tracks its packaging across a network of restaurants and stores, measuring the impact of CO2e emissions avoid- ance and plastic waste reduction. "I think waste in the modern system is just an inefficiency," says Kiku. "There is no reason why we need to create waste if we produce something mind- fully and develop the right systems." Now, well-known Vancouver eateries like Earls, JJ Bean and Jamjar as well as grocers Fresh St. Market and IGA have embraced zero-waste options by using Reusables. Kiku's ulti- mate goal is for the company's packaging to be adopted by more than 5,000 retailers across North America. BOTTOM LINE : Since its launch in 2021, Reusables has diverted over five tonnes of waste, avoided over 20 tonnes of CO2e emissions and empowered more than 5,000 people to reuse 150,000 takeout containers. The team, now consisting of four full-time employees and five contractors, has raised over $1.5 million in funding and generated $250,000 in revenue to date. –R.W.