BCBUSINESS.CA ApRIL 2018 BCBusiness 45
s A m A R t h m o D
Co-founder and CEO
Freshworks stuDio
age: 29
lIfE SToRY: Born in a landlocked
town in the central Indian state of
madhya pradesh to government worker
parents, Samarth mod was out of his
element when he moved to Victoria
at age 25 to pursue an
mBA at UVic's
peter B. gustavson School of Business.
With experience developing mobile
apps for large corporations in India, he
and his partner, Rohit Boolchandani,
were in over their heads with their
first entrepreneurial journey. "It was
a big fail for us," mod recalls. "We
were making an app for the boating
market, and we didn't quite understand
boating. Where I come from, there's no
water."
That was in 2014. Since then,
Victoria-based FreshWorks has
benefited from the networking instincts
of its founders, who were able to get
well-known B.C. investors such as
manny padda and praveen Varshney
on their internal advisory board. The
company now counts BC hydro and
power Authority, harbour Air and the
Vancouver International Wine Festival
among its clients.
THE boTToM lINE: FreshWorks
raked in $2.5 million in 2017 and had
38 employees at press time. The com-
pany plans to open offices in Eastern
Canada and expand to the U.S. in the
next two years. –N.C.
thirty
unDer
thirty
