Four students with connections to the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Mathematics included in Forbes 30 Under 30 for 2021.
The four students, Jeremy Wang, Artem Pasyechnyk, Everest Munro-Zeisberger and Andrei Serban are entrepreneurs involved in gaming and enterprise technology.
Jeremy Wang
Company: Streamer, Disguised Toast
Education: Faculty of Mathematics
Category: Games
With everyone hunkered down at home in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, streamers like Jeremy Wang (BMath ’15), better known by his handle “Disguised Toast,” continued to soar in popularity. In November 2019, Wang signed a deal with Facebook Gaming, making him the first English-speaking creator to commit to the live streaming platform. Wang has been a popular streamer for years, since starting his broadcasts of Hearthstone and Teamfight Tactics back in 2015, and the deal (for an undisclosed sum) brings his gaming exclusively to his more than 1.2 million Facebook followers.
He’s not just hitting it big on Facebook Gaming. Videos of his gameplay are also available on YouTube, where more than three million fans are tuning in to watch him take on the biggest games, including recent hit Among Us.
Artem Pasyechnyk
Company: Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Canix
Education: Faculties of Engineering and Mathematics
Category: Enterprise Technology
Pasyechnyk (right)
In 2018, Artem Pasyechnyk (BSE ’14) left Facebook to partner with Stacey Hronowski, an engineering consultant who had worked with some cannabis companies and identified the challenge of regulatory compliance. Together they founded Canix, a software designed to help retailers with cultivation, compliance regulation and daily operations. Canix provides seed-to-sale support for large and small operations, including inventory management, financial and yield reporting, sales data and more. The platform integrates with other enterprise resource planning software, including metrc, a regulatory track-and-track system employed in 15 states.
Currently serving more than 750 facilities, Canix is a Y Combinator graduate from the summer 2019 class and has raised US $1.5 million to date. They also won TechCrunch’s 2020 Startup Battlefield competition, earning $100,000 in prize money.
Everest Munro-Zeisberger and Andrei Serban
Company: Co-founders, Fuzzbuzz
Education: Faculty of Arts and Faculty of Mathematics
Category: Enterprise Technology
Sabera Hussain (left) Everest Munro-Zeisberger and Andrei Serban (right)
FuzzBuzz co-founder Everest Munro-Zeisberger was a Computer Science student working with the Google ClusterFuzz team when a lightbulb went off. Fuzzing — a software testing methodology that allows developers to test their code for critical bugs — was accessible to big companies, but Munro-Zeisberger wanted to make it accessible for all, regardless of size. Back in Waterloo, he teamed up with fellow Computer Science student Andrei Serban and Liberal Arts student Sabera Hussain to build a platform that would enable developers and security teams to build a continuous feedback loop that can iterate thousands of times per second, 24 hours a day, to find obscure bugs and vulnerabilities.
The trio knew they were on to something in 2018 when their pitch at the winter Velocity Fund Pitch Competition earned them $25,000. Since then, the Fuzzbuzz team has graduated from Y Combinator and landed a CA $3.6 million seed round to continue to scale their business.
Forbes 30 Under 30 is a set of lists issued annually by Forbes magazine and some of its regional editions. In total, eight people with ties to the University of Waterloo made one of the lists this year. To read more about eight people, you can access the full story on Waterloo Stories.