BC Business
The entrepreneur pivoted to medical deliveries after COVID killed his food service company.
Life Story: Peter Shahbeigi sold his first company—”a Nokia wholesaler, back when Nokia was king of the world”—when he was 12 years old growing up in Iran. The son of two doctors, he came to Vancouver in 2012 and sold two more businesses.
So, yeah, Shahbeigi had a ton of experience when a food service company he and longtime friend Poya Ezadpana launched in 2019 had to shut down due to COVID-19. They kept all the funds they’d raised and all the investors on board, shifting to pharmacy deliveries using the same infrastructure, under the name Flash Health Technologies.
“I never thought that I would be in the pharmacy business. It was just an accident that COVID made happen,” Shahbeigi says. “We had to pivot because we had shareholders in the company and had to make sure we could create value for them and make sure the company kept running.”
Bottom Line: They did that and then some. With 17 full-time employees and 220 drivers on the road, Flash Health has partnerships with 275 pharmacies across Canada and is angling toward its goal of same-day delivery of medication anywhere in the country. The company also has its eye on an IPO in the near future.