Many of my business and computer science classmates at the University of Waterloo and Laurier were eager to work at major companies like Tesla, Amazon, or Google after graduation, but I was keen to get on with my dream of starting a business as soon as possible. My parents—Russian immigrants and successful business owners themselves—had always encouraged me to do so, and I figured this was the time I’d have the fewest financial responsibilities and could take bigger risks. 

In my second year at school, I met another student named Griffin Keglevich, who also wanted to start a business. We spent all our time together brainstorming business ideas, intent on solving a real problem we could relate to and understand. 

I’d recently finished a couple co-op placements at big Silicon Valley tech companies, and I hadn’t yet forgotten the hassle I’d faced when moving to Ottawa and Pittsburgh for the roles. Both companies offered to pay my rent, moving expenses, and costs like networking events and gym memberships, but although these costs were pre-approved, I had to pay for them myself and wait to be reimbursed by the company later. These were large financial risks to take on, and in some cases, it took months to get reimbursed because of inefficient expense reporting processes and layers of company bureaucracy. 

When I told Griffin of my past frustrations with expense reporting and the reimbursement process, he and I agreed that an app that manages small businesses’ expense reporting could be successful. We’d long heard that to create a successful business, you should do so in an industry that hasn’t seen innovation in a while, and finance seemed like a good place to start. 

We submitted our idea to the Velocity Incubator at the University of Waterloo. The incubator accepted us and offered office space and mentorship. We began spending countless hours on the phone with the finance teams of rapidly growing startups like Crowdriff, Hubba, and Nudge, trying to understand how their expense reporting processes had evolved over the years. Many teams we spoke with were frustrated by how they handled these expenses: they hated the layers of red tape they had to deal with when approving and compensating expenses. But they didn’t know how to begin changing their processes. 

We had an idea to turn the concept on its side: instead of making the employee take on the risk of spending their own money and getting their expenses approved later, we imagined a platform where a company could create a virtual credit card for an employee, assign it a limit and approved reason for spending, and let them spend company money. While this process benefited employees, it also prevented accounting teams from having to chase employees for receipts and expense reports.

As we spoke to more Canadian accountants, Griffin and I realized they were struggling with more than just expense reports. When companies first incorporated and applied for a corporate credit card, banks would often only offer them a low spending limit, making it harder for businesses to pay their bills or expenses until a month or two into their operations. Once we understood the gaps companies were facing, we realized our imagined platform could cover more than just expense reporting—it could reshape the whole banking ecosystem for small Canadian businesses. 

We set out to build our app—which we dubbed Float—but encountered our first real challenge: securing funding. We knew it was impossible to bootstrap a financial technology company with no external capital, but without proof of customers, investors were not interested. We struggled with this Catch-22 for some time, but we eventually found a way to replicate a mockup of the entire interface we wanted to build using design tools like Figma. We held demos of the prototype so that customers could get a feel for the product without yet using it to process payments. From these trials, we gained proof that customers would use our product and were able to raise our first round of funding. 

In May 2021, Rob Khazzam joined us as our third co-founder and CEO. His previous experience as the general manager of Uber Canada was essential in helping us rapidly grow our business after the initial product launch. We forged a direct partnership with Visa so that we could issue cards to companies through our app. Today, Float allows businesses to give each of their employees their own electronic corporate cards through our app, each set with a specific limit and assigned purpose. Customers can also build complex multi-level approval workflows so that employees can get their expenses approved in the hierarchical order that makes sense for their company. Today, we provide these services to over 4,000 businesses. 

We make money by charging a small fee to merchants who accept our cards, the same way traditional banks and Visa do. We’re proud to offer a completely free plan for our cards and software, which we think is imperative to helping small and medium-sized Canadian businesses grow. Last year we launched our Bill Pay program which allows businesses to pay all their bills through Float. Most recently, we launched new services on the platform to offer Canada’s best exchange rates for small and medium-sized businesses. 

Today, Float not only provides Canadian businesses with corporate credit cards to pay out reimbursements to their employees, but also helps them pay their bills on time and earn interest on their cash balances—it’s an all-in-one solution to manage a business’s spending. 

We are able to provide such services with the help of investors like FJ Labs, OMERS Ventures, Teralys Capital, and Garage Capital, not to mention Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s growth equity arm, which recently provided us $70 million in funding during our Series B funding round. 

Related: How a Rejected Pitch Led Me to Found a $100M Fintech Startup

Rob, Griffin and I always push ourselves to set big goals, break them into bite-sized components, and give ourselves deadlines. Though we face challenges and sometimes get caught up in other people’s expectations of us, we’ve learned to focus on what we can control and go for the most ambitious version of what we plan to build. We are a great team because we share a relentless focus on getting things done and moving forward, which is something we’ve looked for in every one of the 140 employees we’ve hired at Float to date. 

—As told to Samantha Fink