Callture Review

In 1995, Anton Mendoza and Siva Sanmuga were attending University of Waterloo Civil Engineering co-op program. They met during one of the work terms as they shared the same employer. While travelling in Anton’s car for almost one hour each way, they started to talk about starting a business together. The intention was to find developers overseas to work on software projects. On one of Anton’s trips, one of the contacts informed the need of setting up a callback switch process calls originated in emerging markets and terminated in Western countries. At that time, Siva introduced Mamoon Rashid to Anton and the three founded Telcan. Mamoon, also a Civil Engineering student, had software development experience and was the leading brain in developing the first Telcan switch platform. The first hardware was a 386 Tandy computer donated by Anton’s father. Mamoon developed the first callback switch and billing using Visual Voice software and a 4 port Dialogic analog card. With this setup Telcan contracted a dozen international companies. Telcan founders were operating part time for more than 2 years while still attending school. Right after graduation in 1998, Anton started to work full time for Telcan, becoming the first employee the company had. The company acquired about $15,000 capital from the founder’s families and used it to setup equipment at a collocation space in New York, buy a digital card and pay deposits to carriers. And this is how it all started.

Callture - 3 software products