30 Under 30: Esteban Sanchez keeps employees and organizations moving with Commutifi

Esteban Sanchez | Age: 29

Co-founder and CTO,  Commutifi

Life Story: Esteban Sanchez was coding before he was a teenager. When he was growing up in Montreal, his parents would tell him to stop playing on the computer and go outside. By the time he was 14, he would tell them he wasn’t playing, he was working. Sanchez sold his first video game that year, for $2,000.

In high school, he built High Up Games, a video game company that eventually created some 20 games and hit over 30 million in combined plays. But Sanchez had a burning desire to do more.

“I wanted to have more of an impact, do more concrete things,” he says. “Games are fun, but I wanted to do something that mattered.” In 2017, he teamed up with some partners to found Commutifi, a data-driven commuting platform to help cities and their populations move.

“You have companies with thousands of employees—they don’t know where their employees live or how they commute,” says Sanchez. “How do you change that? How do you solve parking problems, sustainability problems, return-to-office and retention problems?”

Commutifi works with both Fortune 500 companies and organizations like TransLink and UBC to help them make decisions on cost-efficient and sustainable parking and transportation programs.

“B.C. has all these goals in terms of climate, but there’s no measurement right now in terms of commuting emissions,” Sanchez says. “We partnered with TransLink to start implementing solutions with the employer to show that we can efficiently understand emissions and reduce them by having employers as part of the solution.”

Bottom Line: Commutifi, which operates remotely, has some 15 employees and is profitable. Sanchez moved to Squamish after COVID to enjoy the outdoors. His parents got their wish, eventually.