Helcim Joins Google's Startup Accelerator 2022 Program

Growth is both thrilling and bruising.

In the first six months of 2022, we've doubled our entire business - including merchants, processing volume, revenues, and team members.

That fast growth has also come with its share of challenges. Over 60% of our team has been at our company for less than a year, and we've needed to reimagine our training and onboarding to accelerate how quickly new team members can roll up their sleeves and make an impact.

Our server environment was originally built "on-prem," meaning that we managed our own hardware at dedicated data centers. But the demand on our infrastructure has been rising faster than we could add hardware, which required us to accelerate our migration to the cloud - an all-encompassing summer sprint for our DevOps and security teams.

We've also felt some of the biggest strains on our Trust & Safety team. They are tasked with keeping up with monitoring transaction fraud risk, all while payment volumes have exponentially grown every month. To try and scale, we created a dedicated machine learning team and accelerated deployment of our machine learning models - AI to the rescue.

A few weeks ago, we were encouraged to apply for Google's Startup Accelerator Program, a 10-week crash course with some of Google's top mentors, engineers, operators, and machine learning scientists. With us quickly scaling our team training, cloud infrastructure, and machining learning, we felt that the timing was perfect and decided to throw our hat into the ring.

So I'm excited to announce that we've been selected to join their 2022 Canadian cohorts, and we look forward to working with the Google team to continue learning how to keep scaling our business. Becoming the world's most loved payments company is a thrilling and bruising mission but one we're dogged to achieve.

Onwards and forwards.

-Nic

P.S. We're looking to onboard another 30 people to the Helcim team this summer. If you know any amazing and passionate people that want to learn and be given disproportionate opportunities for impact and growth, send an intro!