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Founded by two former �ϳܱ���’s PhD students, is poised to go big helping small businesses flourish online, thanks in no small part to its support from �ϳܱ���’s Partnerships and Innovation.

When PhD graduates Dr. Shadi Khalifa and Dr. M. Sami Rakha founded what is now Tradvo, they were looking for challenges. COVID-19 presented one – and inadvertently gave them an innovative idea that could help small businesses, too.

Back in September 2019, when the two created Optima Analytics, the idea was, says Khalifa, who works at the at �ϳܱ���’s and is also an adjunct professor in the School of Computing there, “to develop different solutions using artificial intelligence to different kinds of problems.”

In October 2020, Innovative Solutions Canada (ISC), a part of the National Research Council, issued a challenge to Canadian innovators. “This was at the peak of the pandemic,” says Khalifa. Personal protective equipment of any description was hard to come by. ISC called on innovators to develop what is called a “matching” algorithm to deal with this. “The idea was if there is a local company doing hand sanitizer and there is a hospital nearby that needed it, the algorithm would find the closest supplier of PPE and connect them.” The algorithm that Khalifa and Rakha developed won, and ISC awarded Optima Analytics Inc about one million dollars over two years to build Phases 1 & 2 of the product and bring it into a commercialization-ready platform.

One thing that became clear as they worked on the improved version of their original product (named Tradvo) was that something like it could have a broader commercial application. Recognizing how central this product would be to their company going forward, they rebranded Optima Analytics after their new product, Tradvo.

Stating it simply, Tradvo is an “AI-powered network for businesses and individuals to buy, sell, and discover goods and services.” That conjures up the idea of something like Facebook, but there is much more to it than that. The analogy that Rakha makes is with Netflix. Like that popular streaming service, Tradvo follows what is known as a “Software as a service” (SaaS) business model. Users subscribe and pay a monthly fee to access the premium features that Tradvo offers. Different levels of service have different costs, depending on the number and limits of features available.

How this works is as follows. A business, let’s say an office supply company, joins Tradvo and enters its details to build a business profile page, including its listings, contact information, and media content. Buyers and users on Tradvo can follow that business page and chat requesting best price quotes. Starting on the basic listing at Tradvo is Free (). However, Tradvo has three paid membership levels for businesses and sellers to leverage more features and fewer limitations.

Tradvo business profile pages should help businesses with marketing, which allows them to gain followers and new customers. Where it gets interesting is that key component of the Tradvo experience, the matching algorithm. In this case of our office supply company, the algorithm will connect them with those companies looking for office equipment and furniture, who can begin to follow them. They can utilize a chat feature built into Tradvo and connect when they have new products or exciting offers. Tradvo keeps all parties updated by sending email notifications. Although intended primarily for business-to-business transactions, business-to-customer ones would also be possible. And, of course, they’ll be connected with firms (which have been verified by Tradvo) that have products and services they may want. As part of its SaaS business model, Tradvo also provides a guaranteed payment system whereby subscribers can pay through the site, and the funds are only released on the delivery of the goods or services. For its users, the site’s transactional focus and simplicity says Rakha, “lets businesses escape the social media noise and have more focused and immediate interrelations with their followers.”

Tradvo’s connection with �ϳܱ���’s Partnership and Innovation (QPI) dates back almost to its founding as Optima Analytics. Early on, they joined the Wings Program. “We attended sessions about customer acquisition, learning about your market, and your advantage over your competitors,” Rakha says. Outside that, working together with QPI team members Amanda Gilbert and Rick Boswell, he says, “helped us a lot in finding affordable services like lawyers and bookkeeping help.” The firm had also originally hoped to set up in the Seaway Co-working space in downtown Kingston but finally demurred, says Rakha, in part because of COVID-19. These days Tradvo maintains a �ϳܱ���’s connection through students it has hired as interns through the Mitacs program.

Tradvo currently has 300 small-business users who they have invited to use the site for free. This gives them a marketing boost, and in light of what they are learning from them, they have kept busy the past few months tweaking the website. In October, they launched a new version of their software, one that, says Rakha, “includes all the SaaS features and the buy/sell part of the platform.” Not long after, Tradvo welcomed its first paid subscriber for the full SaaS service they provide. “For the next year or so,” he says, “we’ll be trying to bring in more traffic and gain traction. And we hope that in the next year we can bring in some investors too, so we can scale it up.”