Aryan Vemulapalli’s older sister almost didn’t do it. She had studied Computer Science at the University of Waterloo — the safe, expected path, the one both her parents had taken before her. But she had always wanted to build something, and for years she carried that want quietly, wondering if she had missed her moment. Then she got selected for Next Canada, a national entrepreneurship program that picks thirty-six people from across the country. The dream she’d set aside came back to life.
Aryan was watching. He was young enough that he couldn’t fully name what he saw, but old enough to feel it: that the rules he’d assumed were fixed — the degree, the career, the path his parents had mapped — were not fixed at all. His sister had found her way through. And somewhere in that realization, his own ambition quietly took root.
“She showed me that she could fulfil her dream through entrepreneurship and she could do whatever she wanted. The possibilities were endless. And so that’s where my dream started — wow, there’s so many things I can do, so many people I can help.”
By the time Aryan arrived at the University of Manitoba campus in the summer of 2025 for Shad Manitoba, he was sixteen, a student council leader at St. Francis Xavier Secondary School in Mississauga, and carrying a conviction that he had something to contribute. He just hadn’t found the right problem yet. Shad handed him one.
The year’s Design Challenge theme was public transportation. Aryan’s first reaction, like most of his teammates, was honest: they knew nothing about it, and what they did know wasn’t flattering. Public transit was slow, stigmatized, unglamorous. But Shad Manitoba’s program brought in transit professionals, sustainability experts, and entrepreneurs with serious credentials — including a founding member of Slack — and something started to shift.
“I talked to someone from the TTC who’d worked there for over 35 years. He was talking about all this history, and I was like, wow — public transportation makes up such a huge part of our lives, and oftentimes it goes unnoticed. A lot of transit companies are implementing stuff to help people have more fun on public transit. That’s where I had this passion that I could help people through it.”
The team’s first idea was inspired by a trip Shad Manitoba students took to Churchhill, a remote northern town on Hudson Bay, famous for beluga whales and polar bears and a particular kind of self-sufficiency. What struck Aryan was the community centre: one building that served as school, hospital, and playground simultaneously. The team saw an opportunity. Churchill had distinct neighbourhoods connected by nothing much, so why not a tram to link them? They built the concept out, worked the logic, then hit the wall.
“The cost of living in Churchill is super expensive — you’re constantly importing everything. Orange juice costs like a hundred dollars. Adding the cost of public transportation on top of that would not be ideal for these individuals. And there’s not many rural growing neighbourhoods for transit. That’s a very small demographic. We needed to think bigger.”
They needed to pivot. That pivot — from a tram in Churchill to something anyone in Mississauga, Manitoba, or Montreal could use — is where Bus Buddies was born. The core insight came from listening: survey after survey across the University of Manitoba campus pointed to the same two gaps. Riders felt no sense of community on public transit, and there were no incentives to choose the bus over other options. The team’s answer was to close both gaps at once.
The model was simple and smart: the more you ride, the more you earn. Bus Buddies would partner with local businesses — coffee shops, restaurants — to offer in-app discounts redeemable by frequent riders. A social layer, built like Duolingo’s achievement system, would let commuters react to each other’s milestones. Took the bus instead of driving? Your network sees it. Rode five days straight? That deserves a reaction.
Then came Sylvie.
She was one of the founding members of Slack, brought in as a mentor during the program. When Aryan’s team pitched Bus Buddies to her, she didn’t hedge.
“She was like, wow, this is so cool, I would do it a hundred percent, you guys need to move forward with it. And those few words were huge. She’s a founding member of Slack — if she believes in us, we need to believe in ourselves as well.”
Not every team member carried that belief into August. Senior year was coming. IB coursework was waiting. The summer was ending and some teammates made the reasonable choice to step back. Aryan understood. He and his co-founder, Nickolai Junussov — a Shad Manitoba teammate from British Columbia who brought deep AI knowledge to the partnership — made a different choice.
“We were like, okay, we really see the potential for this idea. This can literally do great things. So we moved forward, just the two of us.”
What followed was unglamorous. Aryan was doing a physics summer course in Mississauga. Nickolai was in British Columbia. They ran on small calls and cold outreach — Aryan working through lists of local businesses, pitching the partnership model one reply at a time. Kelsey’s Roadhouse said yes. Mr. Puffs said yes. The traction was slow, then suddenly it wasn’t.
The turning point came from an unlikely direction: a clapping video. Inspired by a viral marketing stunt from the home rental platform Vrbo, Aryan and Nickolai filmed themselves delivering a deliberately absurd, rhythmic pitch for Bus Buddies. They put it on Instagram. Nickolai’s account went from 48 followers to over a thousand. The video hit 750,000 views.
“When we were applying for Unfounders, some of the organizers had actually seen the video before. They were like, we recognize your company. And we were like — if the organizers recognize it, maybe we have a chance.”
Unfounders selects five startup teams from a global pool spanning more than twenty-two countries and flies them to San Francisco for Tech Week — a week of investor calls, pitch sessions, and introductions to people building at the highest levels of the startup ecosystem. Aryan and Nickolai were selected. Two Canadian high schoolers, one from Ontario and one from British Columbia, were going to California to pitch to the people who fund the future.
The week moved fast. Calls with partners at Andreessen Horowitz. Meetings with Pear VC. A pitch in front of a live panel of judges that included names Aryan had only read about. And then, on the last night, a dinner that changed how he understood the whole game.
“This guy just came along and we were like, who is this? Turns out he raised twenty million dollars at eighteen. He’d gotten into Y Combinator in two days. He knows Mark Cuban. And I’m like — I’m not meeting people like this in Ontario. People here are investing in who he is, not just the idea. So I thought, okay. Let’s stop hiding behind the idea. Let’s be confident in ourselves.”
That shift in thinking — from confidence in the product to confidence in the founders — is the one Aryan names when asked what San Francisco actually taught him. Not pitch mechanics or cap tables or term sheets. The understanding that the person standing in front of the idea matters as much as the idea itself.
He is still sixteen. Bus Buddies is still growing. At the end of Shad Manitoba, students wrote messages for each other in a Monthbook — a record of the month, passed around for everyone to sign. Aryan still reads through his. He says he still gets a little tear.
“I might not see these people again, but those memories we had during that month at Shad — that’s not something you can take away from us ever. I met my co-founder there. I met the mentor who believed in our idea. I found the problem I wanted to solve. It was a life-changing experience.”
When asked to define what it means to be an entrepreneur, Aryan does not reach for Silicon Valley mythology. He reaches for something closer.
“Someone who doesn’t give up, no matter how hard things get. I’ve had so many challenges already, and I know I’ll have so many more, but they make me stronger every single time.”
His favourite entrepreneur? He grins before answering.
“Probably my sister. She’d probably be really mad if I didn’t say her name.”
The story began with her. It still does. And somewhere between a tram in Churchill, a viral video, and a dinner table in San Francisco, Shad gave him the place to start writing it.