Entrepreneur of the Year 2025: Inside Hiive, the Vancouver startup shaking up pre-IPO trading

By 2020, Sim Desai had built a career in brokerage but was finding the space frustratingly opaque and antiquated—without online platforms, clients had to call a broker just to understand the market. Desai was ready to go all-in on supporting his wife Sarah Huggins’s restaurant—until COVID forced a change of plans. Setting the restaurant business aside, the husband-and-wife duo decided to disrupt the brokerage industry from home with a new idea: a transparent, online marketplace for trading pre-IPO stock.

They “bootstrapped” Hiive with $3 million—all the while raising three kids at home. Leveraging Desai and CRO Prab Rattan’s reputations in the industry, the group demoed the platform to their personal connections and let word of mouth do the rest. By 2024, Hiive was named the number four startup in Canada by LinkedIn, behind software developers Cohere and PostGrid, and financial firm Float.

“I realized that if we could centralize the market somehow, that would be a major source of value creation,” says Desai. “Before platforms like Hiive, buyers and sellers had no real way to answer the most basic question: what is my [pre-IPO] stock worth?”

Desai envisioned Hiive as more than just a marketplace—he saw it as the future of investment banking: modern, tech-driven and transparent. Built to give real-time pricing based on verified user orders, plus streamline and automate transactions, Hiive does away with gatekeeping by providing a transparent order book. The results speak for themselves: over $2 billion in transactions brokered at the time of writing.

 

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Huggins, chief operating officer, explains that pre-IPO trading has traditionally been conducted over phone or emails. “You were basically operating on blind faith,” she says. “Now, we’re putting raw data directly into the hands of users so they can make informed decisions. That’s the future.”

It’s no secret that many B.C. developers and tech entrepreneurs end up in Silicon Valley, but Hiive is working to reverse that “brain drain”—recruiting top Vancouver talent and even relocating global hires.

The company, now equipped with more than 150 employees, has an in-person-first policy, which means regularly catered lunches, employee workout classes and volunteer initiatives like soup kitchens and blood drives. Ultimately, Desai’s long-term goal is to build Hiive into a global tech brand, keeping Vancouver as its anchor.

How do you celebrate your achievements?

With our team. We love what we do and we have fun doing it, so our celebrations are high-energy. There is no shortage of emojis on Slack, weekday gatherings with curated local snacks and drinks and a contagious enthusiasm that makes everyone feel a part of Hiive’s success.