BC Business
Childhood friends Arya Rashtchian and Nader Samadyan allow customers to sell and deliver pretty much anything.
Life Story: Growing up in Tehran, Arya Rashtchian played for the Iranian capital’s professional basketball team. In high school, hoping to leave his conservative homeland, he told his father he wanted to move to Canada. “He was like, Yeah, all good,” Rashtchian recalls, “but I’m not going to pay for it.” So after completing a software engineering degree from Sharif University of Technology, Rashtchian won a scholarship to do a master of computer science at UBC. Moving to Vancouver in 2018, he reconnected with his childhood friend Nader Samadyan, who earned a BSc in computer science from the same school and went on to work as a software developer for SAP Canada and as an infrastructure engineer with Sony Pictures Imageworks.
Halfway through his master’s, Rashtchian realized that he wanted to be an entrepreneur after getting accepted to the Creative Destruction Lab program at UBC Sauder School of Business. So he and Samadyan launched DineEasy, a mini management platform for restaurants. Although the pair brought about 30 local clients on board, they decided the venture wasn’t for them. A series of pivots led to Omnicart, a white-label service for entrepreneurs who lack the technology to create their own delivery business.
Unlike its U.S.-based rivals, which focus on food and beverage, Omnicart allows customers to sell just about anything. “With our product, they can establish a delivery business for food and beverage, liquor, consumer goods, cannabis,” explains Rashtchian, whose company uses a subscription model and takes a commission for each order. “Also, we offer them a drastically more customizable and modern technology.”
Bottom Line: Omnicart, which launched its product in May 2021, recently began a formal alliance with the Restaurant Marketing and Delivery Association (RMDA), whose 550-plus members span 700 U.S. cities. The 10-employee company plans to have 200 partners by the end of 2024. “The U.S. market will be the main focus in the next 12 months,” Rashtchian says. “After that, we’ll definitely consider expansion to Asia, South America and other areas.”