Willing to fail, unwilling to give up

A little over a year before UM student Tinashe Mutamangira was preparing his Dragon’s Den Season 19 audition, he was preparing his business plan for the 2023 Stu Clark New Venture Championships.

He took the plan, handwritten on scrap paper and stapled together with the cover page boasting “INTUITION PAY MASTER BLUEPRINT,” to the Stu Clark Centre for Entrepreneurship, housed at the Asper School of Business, working with the team to prepare his idea for the annual competition.

“This really is the manuscript and shows how the company was built on a piece of paper before I did anything else. At the beginning, it was kind of like a journal, where you’re putting ideas on the blank page and letting it grow, thinking ‘how will I address this?’ ‘but, what about that?’”

Mutamangira’s company is still called InTuition Pay, an online platform that helps international students pay tuition fees instantaneously by making local banks and Canadian universities more interoperable. In short, InTuition Pay allows students to pay their tuition fees using local currency, avoiding costly transfer, conversion or late fees.

The idea is informed by Mutamangira’s personal experience as an international student from Zimbabwe.

“I have seen how my community faces challenges accessing finances from back home. Moving money from the global south is slow and expensive, averaging 13% per transaction, and the consequences of not being able to pay tuition on time are dire: international students risk delays in their studies or even deportation if they are unable to enroll in classes,” he explains.

“I saw anxiety and depression skyrocket among international students across Canada due to these concerns, and I decided to build a solution that would ensure a smooth academic transition for new students and eventually all newcomers.”

Debra Jonasson-Young (I.H. Asper Executive Director of Entrepreneurship) and Tinashe Mutamangira at the 2023 Stu Clark New Venture Championships. Photo by Tony Nardella

Mutamangira spent twelve months preparing for the New Venture Championships and placed fourth in the undergraduate business plan category. In the year since, he has leveraged the connections and insights of his competition experience and been accepted into multiple accelerators across Canada.

When the production crew of Dragon’s Den Season 19 came to Winnipeg, he knew it was time to audition (once more). Despite not making it through the first time he auditioned in 2022, he had more confidence, more experience and an ever-determined entrepreneurial mindset.

“The Stu Clark Centre created an atmosphere that allowed me to develop my plan until I was confident enough to express myself and my thoughts. They nurtured the idea from inception, and it’s those roots that still hold the foundation of the company together.” He adds, “entrepreneurship is all about perseverance. If you are trying, you will eventually find success.”

In many ways, Mutamangira’s story reflects what a platform like InTuition Pay can make possible. Since arriving at UM, he has spread his studies and electives across three different disciplines: engineering, actuarial science and economics. He didn’t declare a major until his final year and plans to graduate in Winter 2025 with a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in economics and completing a minor in management from the Asper School of Business.

In other words, he took his time, focused on learning and pursued the many experiential learning opportunities available to UM students. He felt nervous about participating in a prestigious pitch competition, not about ensuring that he could access his hard-earned money on time.

An app like InTuition Pay is designed to help international students make the most of their university experience by reducing financial barriers and bridging the gap in payment infrastructure between universities and financial institutions.

He can’t yet share the results of his Dragon’s Den experience, and interested readers will have to tune in to see if his story makes it into an episode—whatever happens, he is, at the end of the day, an entrepreneur undeterred by having to try again.

“For me,” he says, “an entrepreneur is a person who is willing to fail but not willing to give up.”

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Learn more about how the Stu Clark Centre for Entrepreneurship at the Asper School of Business supports UM student entrepreneurs like Tinashe Mutamangira here.

Be sure to tune in for Dragon’s Den Season 19 to cheer on Mutamangia and Asper alum Cheryl Zealand this fall on CBC.

Emily Wilson