Before ApplyBoard was a company, it was a favour from one brother to two others. Martin Basiri, the eldest, had left Iran for Waterloo to study mechatronics engineering. When his twin brothers Meti and Massi, still at home, wanted to follow, he walked them through the Canadian application process himself. It was slow, confusing work, and he did it by hand.
The family background, as described in profiles, was modest. Their parents were educators. Martin was the first to look abroad, and he pushed the twins to come. They arrived a year after him and enrolled at Conestoga College, while Martin studied at the University of Waterloo.
Schools got a filtered stream of candidates through recruitment partners.
What nobody planned was that the favour would become a business. The brothers had met every obstacle an international student meets: unfamiliar visa rules, grade conversions that nobody could explain, applications that went to one school at a time. In 2015, in Waterloo, they founded ApplyBoard to put all of it on one platform. They soon moved into the Velocity Garage, the University of Waterloo's startup space.
The idea worked because it served two sides. Students got one application route. Schools got a filtered stream of candidates through recruitment partners. By 2019 the team had about 170 people, and in 2019 it launched ApplyProof, a way to verify acceptance letters and English test results. In 2020 it opened in the UK. By June 2021 headcount had reached around 1,000 and the company was valued at US$3.2 billion after raising roughly US$475 million.
The price came later. Critics said the company did not supervise its agents closely enough, and that some applicants were given empty promises or biased advice. Meti Basiri said in 2022 that the company met the regulations. That November it laid off 6 percent of staff. By 2024 its valuation had fallen about 74 percent to under US$1 billion, which the company called a moment in time. In 2025, with fewer student visas being approved, it cut more than 150 jobs.
The business had been built on a government dial it did not control. When Canada tightened international student numbers, the demand that carried ApplyBoard up to a unicorn valuation shrank with it.
For a first-time founder the story is plain. The best product ideas can come from helping one person you love through a bad process. But a platform that sits on top of policy inherits the policy's risks, and the brothers learned that at scale.