Experience true cloud freedom with OVHcloud’s open and adaptable solutions. Avoid vendor lock-in and take full control over your data, technology, and cloud costs. Learn how!
Hello to Canada’s SaaS Community,
Martin Basiri’s passion for increasing educational opportunities was so strong—and so personally driven—that he left his own unicorn company to start from the ground up. Speaking with SAAS NORTH, Martin explained more about how passion led him to found (then leave) ApplyBoard and ultimately start Passage, raising a $40 million Seed round.
Key takeaways:
- While leading university application platform ApplyBoard, Martin noticed foreign-born students in Canada sorely lacked financial infrastructure, an experience he knew well from his own past as an international student at University of Waterloo.
- He ultimately decided to leave ApplyBoard and build Passage to help close the opportunity gap for international students in Canada.
- But building from passion doesn’t automatically mean charity; Martin chose to work with a corporate structure for much deeper availability of capital.
Co-Founder/Producer, SAAS NORTH Conference Editor, SAAS NORTH NOW
After co-founding and building university application platform ApplyBoard into a unicorn, Martin Basiri left to start Passage, a platform to help people from all over the world access educational opportunities in Canada.
You might wonder why a co-founder would leave a successful, well-funded startup to build something new in the same industry.
Martin’s answer? Passion.
Speaking with SAAS NORTH, Martin explained more about how his passion drove decision making—and ultimately led to a $40 million Seed round.
Fellow is the privacy and compliance-focused AI notetaker built for enterprise. Keep your meetings data safe while leveraging powerful AI capabilities like recording, transcription, and summaries—all designed for seamless integration into your existing tools and meeting workflows.
Spotting a deeper problem
While building ApplyBoard, Martin and the team worked with thousands of high school and higher education students applying to universities and colleges across Canada.
During that time, a glaring issue came to light: foreign-born students have almost very few financing options for higher education in Canada. They were reliant entirely on funding from back home—something Martin knew well when he moved to Canada, funded entirely by scholarships, to attend the University of Waterloo.
“I grew up with a lot of poor people who, because of lack of financial [resources], didn’t have access [to higher education],” said Martin. “It’s in my blood; I experienced it. It’s my life.”
This is what drove him to leave a successful company and start all over again with Passage—he knew the problem and felt his unique skill set, experience, and network could help solve it.
Without domestic Canadian job experience and credit scores, Martin and the Passage team have had to get creative when it comes to vetting students to ensure only the best and brightest make it through.
The team has a thesis of “betting on hard working people, works.” That means they look for signals a student is capable of making it through the academics in Canada and starting a new life, like the previous obstacles someone has overcome. But Passage also offers more than just financing; they provide support once a student arrives, for example helping them find part time jobs or a mentor.
We are a sell-side Mu0026A advisory firm with core expertise in B2B Enterprise Cloud, SaaS, and IT companies. Strategic mergers, exits, and carve-outs for technology companies are all we do.
Picking a business model that scales
You’d be forgiven for wondering why Passage is not a charity. After all, a lot of its work is focused on helping people achieve the Canadian dream of education, safety, and growth opportunities.
Martin also pondered this possibility.
The reason he chose the corporate route is simple: availability of funds.
Martin explained that Canadians donate approximately $11 billion to charity each year. However, the international education market is worth over $35 billion annually. And even if every charity penny in Canada went to this specific problem, it wouldn’t amount to the full $11 billion because of longer-term capital like endowment funding.
But there is a significant amount of money in student loans and the broader debt services market. This opened a door for Martin, since a much larger pool of capital meant more opportunity to back his novel approach to student financing; an approach that landed more than $40 million in seed capital to use on its mission.
“We have a lot on the balance sheet from investors,” said Martin. “We are using our own money.”
Action creates information
As Martin continues to navigate building Passage—with all the intricacies and challenges of, for instance, getting visas for Afghani girls to come to Canada—his problem solving approach remains the same.
First, he talks to people about the problem or his proposed solution. Second, he takes action in some small way until he either solves the problem or runs into a wall, at which point he talks to someone else.
If this seems overly simplistic, the devil is in the details. Talking to people is a form of research and needs to be done right; action has to genuinely try to solve a problem despite whatever obstacles may exist, and document the process so you can learn from it.
But getting through these difficult processes is a matter of passion.
“One thing I’ve learned a lot more in my life is: the greater focus I put in our mission to make opportunities accessible for everyone, the greater joy it has and the greater focus the company gets,” said Martin.