Innovator . Entrepreneur

Based: Cape Town

TAMIR, WHAT WERE YOU BUSY WITH BEFORE COVID-19 STRUCK?

Before COVID-19, I was working on Quillo, a 2nd hand marketplace targeted towards university students. A friend and I built a quick weekend project called Coronapp on March the 15th. The platform went viral getting 1.5M website hits in less than two months. Given the success of the platform, I became incredibly passionate about the role tech could play in fighting the pandemic. Without a vaccine, the only weapon we have is technology. Consequently, I gave my undivided attention on how to use technology to help South Africa overcome this pandemic.

TELL US ABOUT YOUR PROJECT – HOW DID THE INSPIRATION STRIKE?

A coronavirus story: in Q2 of 2020, the market became aware that it had a seemingly insurmountable problem: employees of frontline workers were simply unprepared for the pandemic and were unable to source the PPE they needed.

A broken supply chain: There was a huge global shortage of PPE, prices had sky-rocketed, and scams around PPE had eroded trust in this market.

A founder with a knack for creating marketplaces: Enter me, Tamir Shklaz, a young entrepreneur who had early success with creating a textbook marketplace, and was ready for a new challenge. I quickly rallied together a small high-performance team that has created the Insupply platform. Within a month, Insupply had seed funding from well-known investors and advisors, Justin Drennan and Hasson Hasson, and set up a small team to build the platform and logistics.