Canadian tech startup founder’s “overnight success” took 15 years of hard slogging

“Overnight success” for Canadian entrepreneur and tech startup founder Shamira Jaffer (photo at right) took 15 years of hard slogging and a Mount Everest’s worth of perseverance.

“The biggest challenge in Canada is getting money as a startup,” the founder, president and CEO of Signifi Solutions told Research Money. “To build requires money – it’s a reality in a business. You can’t grow without money.”

Like many founders with early-stage companies, Jaffer bootstrapped her then Mississauga, Ontario-based company (headquarters are now in Toronto) when she was unable to secure sufficient capital.

“I have to say, I have a lot of scars,” she said. “I worked so hard, and it could have all gone sideways.”

Given the continual challenges she faced as an entrepreneur in Canada, Jaffer said she spent many years thinking only of moving her company to the United States, with its much larger venture capital pool and more business-friendly environment.

It is “far harder” for startup founders in Canada than it is for their counterparts in the U.S., she said. “For a long, long time, the only thought in my head was [that] I had to figure out how to get to the U.S. It was so critical for me to get out of here. I knew I was in a dead-end place.” 

Jaffer, a natural problem solver who worked in a software enterprise environment, got the idea for her company and its automated, self-serve vending kiosks when she started seeing retail companies move to online sales.

“I recognized quite early on that there was a real gap in well-integrated hardware and software,” she said.

Intrigued by using a touchscreen device to renew her driver’s license, she envisioned a line of high-barrier-to-entry, strongly integrated, touchscreen-driven products, with “hardware and software that just hummed and worked together like they were built by one company.” 

However, she immediately encountered barriers in establishing her company. “I would say that even trying to get a line of credit [as an entrepreneur] is impossible in this country.” 

Her bank at the time would give her only a $40,000 line of credit, which was woefully insufficient for building a new business. “I had a $40,000 line of credit, and I had payroll of $40,000.”

Fortunately, Economic Development Canada (EDC) entered her life. EDC guaranteed a $250,000 line of credit from RBC. 

“It was like winning millions of dollars,” Jaffer recalled. “It just basically took the handcuffs off. It wasn’t a big amount of money, but it saved the day.” 

Signifi Solutions then managed to secure a $500,000-loan, which she said was extremely fortunate because “we were so close to not making it at that point.”

Securing financing, however, didn’t put an end to the challenges for the fledgling tech startup.

Signifi Solutions’ automated vending kiosks and other products – with the company’s  blend of proprietary software and hardware – help businesses manage assets and prevent loss of assets, including in automated retail service. 

Signifi is SOC 2 Type II-certified, which means the company consistently meets complex requirements for data security, privacy and access control of its machines.

Today, the company sells thousands of its machines globally and has 24/7 service locations across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific.

But up to about five years ago, Jaffer ran into another problem that plagues Canadian tech companies. She couldn’t sell her innovative products to businesses in Canada. 

A hard sell: getting Canadian businesses to buy Canadian 

From its earliest stages, Signifi sold its machines to customers in the Middle East, Europe and the U.S. Even today, with the company’s global sales, most of its customers are in the U.S.

“There’s a bias against entrepreneurs [in Canada],” Jaffer said, “Whereas in the U.S. [it’s this positive response]: ‘You’re an entrepreneur!’” 

  Although that situation has started to change in Canada, she added, “It’s almost as if there’s a bit of mistrust [of entrepreneurs], which is kind of sad because at the end of the day, I’m putting a lot of food on a lot of people’s tables. Lots of families depend on me.”

Like other Canadian tech startups, Jaffer found that Canadian businesses were reluctant to buy her company’s products. “There is not a strong buy-Canadian mindset here, and that is a shame. I think there’s almost this feeling that the product is better coming from elsewhere.”

“There’s not this value for ‘It’s made in Canada; it’s going to be better.’ The mindset should be: ‘Canada first.’” 

It took Signifi nearly 15 years to finally land its first Canadian customers, “and really, they came because the U.S. entities knew us.” 

The positive aspect of getting Canadian customers is that once they do come, they bring a lot of loyalty and a strong, solid relationship, Jaffer said.

For example, Canadian Tire is now a customer, having deployed Signifi’s automated lockers where customers can pick up their orders without standing in line at a customer services desk.

Signifi was a small business in Mississauga with about 30 employees, making and selling its machines to the Middle East and Europe, when the company “walked into a big partner, and they saw the product and the future for it,” Jaffer said.

Through that partnership, Signifi developed relationships with other big partners like IBM, Google, Accenture, Unisys, HP, Fujitsu, Infosys and many more. These “channel partners” now incorporate Signifi’s products in their solutions that they sell around the world. 

“These are global companies. So we’re shipping around the world,” Jaffer said. “It allows us to expand globally without having to put offices everywhere.”

Signifi’s products are far more advanced than the world’s original vending machine, which made its first U.S. appearance in 1888, selling chewing gum on New York City train platforms.

All of Signifi’s highly engineered products are designed and built to manage assets in environments where security is critical. The company’s WiFi-enabled robotic kiosks can be adjusted from the firm’s Mississauga office using real-time communications.

Say, for example, you’re at the office and your laptop suddenly stops working and you need another one. You can go to Signifi’s secure automated kiosk at your location, tap your employee badge, which enables Signifi to authenticate your identity, the kiosk door opens, and you take out a loaner laptop (or a fully charged scanner or a USB key or whatever other piece of IT you need).

“Everything is really about creating efficiency, getting you what you need in the right format, making sure it’s working, and it’s available to you,” Jaffer noted.

Another product, called TED (Tech Express Desk), gives users access, at the push of a button, to an IT expert remotely. Users can plug in their laptop and troubleshoot a problem with the IT expert and, if the problem can’t be fixed, immediately get a loaner laptop from the kiosk.

Signifi’s automated customer-service lockers can be used in pharmacies by people who don’t need to see the pharmacist to pick up their regular prescriptions. Or the machines can be used in an industrial setting to securely dispense a particular bolt or drilling bit or whatever piece of equipment that’s needed.

“So we’re able to drive that [business’s] inventory and that asset. We’ve got the asset to that person in a very timely manner,” Jaffer said. “At the end of the day, we save people time. We give back time.”

Federal innovation program support “saved” the company 

Signifi Solutions has grown from a small 30-employee company to a firm with 140 staff from countries across the globe, including France, Brazil, Korea, India, China, Russia and Ukraine.

The company’s products are used daily by more than 2.2 million people doing 350 million-plus transactions in over 45 countries. 

“We do millions and millions of dollars [worth] of exports, money coming back into Canada,” Jaffer said.

The global intelligent vending machines market size surpassed US$8 billion in 2020 and is projected to expand at around 10-percent annually from 2021 to 2027, according to Global Market Insights. Global industry shipments are expected to exceed 2.5 million units by 2027.

Signifi is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. The company had help along the way from several federal innovation programs, including the Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) tax credit, the National Research Council-Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP), Export Development Canada and others.

In May 2021, Signifi received nearly $2.4 million from the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario to expand manufacturing capacity at the company’s Mississauga facility. 

“There were times when we should have just closed shop and left. But the programs came at an opportune time,” Jaffer said.

Although SR&ED helped, she considers the program to be “upside down. It’s a program where I have to prove that I’ve failed; I tried, and I failed, and then I failed again. If you tried and you succeeded in the first go, in that program, it means you didn’t innovate hard enough.”

“To me, it’s the opposite of what you should be training people [on],” she added.

Jaffer found IRAP, on the other hand, to be a “tremendous program. It’s a program where you have to show innovation, you have to build something, and then you have to show that you took it to market and you did something with it. That’s the right mindset.”

IRAP is more forward-thinking, wanting the business to show it has patented and sold its product, she added. “It fits better with the entrepreneur’s character.”

Jaffer said she has seen a big shift in Canada in programs like IRAP compared with when she launched Signifi Solutions 20 years ago.

Now, the people at IRAP typically come from a company or ran a business, she said. “So I’m now dealing with people who understand my challenges.”

It is “absolutely 100-percent imperative” that the federal government continue to provide innovation programs run by such people with business expertise, Jaffer said. 

“Help Canadian companies grow, and then help Canadian companies expand. That’s the only way you’re going to keep the ‘brains’ here. Make it easier to be a Canadian entrepreneur.”

In 2023, Jaffer was recognized as an RBC Canadian Women Entrepreneurs Awards Innovation winner. 

Yet she acknowledged that if it wasn’t for the federal government’s innovation programs, “I 100-percent would not be in Canada. It was really painful to stay here.”

At the same time, she said, she has a deep sense of loyalty. In the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump imposing a 25-percent tariff on Canadian goods imported into the U.S., Signifi might be forced to move to the U.S., she said.

“But we are going to keep the brains and the manufacturing – everything here [in Canada]. It would be a sales office in the U.S.,” Jaffer said.

“That kind of loyalty from a business owner comes when you’ve got these government programs that basically saved us. These kinds of programs are the only reason I’m still here [in Canada].”

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