The son of a nurse and entrepreneur, Sahil Manjania combined a little bit of what he’s inherited from his parents to build what he believes can be a multi-million dollar medical device business.
It’s a bold claim for a 23-year-old to make less than two years out of school, but his track record makes it hard to refute.
“My goal is to make this company another Ontario legacy, like Baylis Medical Technologies,” says Manjania, who founded his own medical device company, DIA Labs Canada, in February of 2024. “They bootstrapped that company into a successful startup venture, and it’s located in Mississauga.”
Though it may seem ambitious Manjania grew up watching his father turn a similar ambition into viable ventures in a range of sectors. After immigrating to Canada in the early ‘90s he launched a successful clothing business, selling custom jerseys from his shop in the Meadowvale Town Centre.
After the mall was demolished he returned to India where he founded a transport and stone business, then another in the food supply chain industry, and then opened a banquet hall. After returning to Canada in 2007 Sahil’s father co-founded a successful jewelry business, which he and Sahil’s brother continue to operate today.
Rather than following his father into business, however, Sahil followed in his mother’s footsteps — at least at first — and pursued a double major in health sciences and biology from Western University.
“My mom was a nurse, and she stayed committed to her job even after my father became successful,” he says. “Her curiosity, her commitment to helping patients, and her willingness to be on the front lines during a pandemic really inspired me.”
Early in his academic journey, however, Sahil says that entrepreneurial itch started to catch up to him.
In third year, a global health professor challenged his students to come up with innovative solutions for a pitch competition. The next year, that same professor asked Sahil to help him design an innovation course that was being adopted from the Ivey business school for health sciences students.
Around that same time Sahil started doing research on asthma signalling pathways as part of an advanced cell biology course.
“Patients who suffer from severe asthma, they currently do not have any monitoring solution,” he says. “It was my own curiosity, after hours in my dorm room, trying to understand how other conditions have these tools, but asthma doesn’t.”
That is what inspired Sahil to found DIA Labs Canada in 2024, hiring some of his classmates to help build the medical device company, pursuing an asthma monitoring solution as their first product.
The solution, Airsense, looks a lot like the glucose monitoring patches that many diabetes patients wear, using a similar technology to monitor for indicators of an asthma attack; something sufferers are largely unable to anticipate.
“It goes on the back of the arm, and it’s able to monitor inflammatory biomarkers from the interstitial fluid,” Sahil explains. “You basically get alerts when the inflammation is significantly rising.”
Not only can it help Canada’s 5 million asthma sufferers prevent asthma attacks, but it can also help medical professionals offer more proactive solutions, helping to country’s hospital system cut down on the $2 billion spent on treatment each year.
After graduating and moving the company to a small office on Eglinton Avenue in Mississauga in 2024 Sahil says he was looking into government grants for medical devices, when he came across IDEA Mississauga, a startup incubator just down the street.
“I drove down and just went up to the staff sitting at the front desk and said, ‘hey, what’s all this about?’” he says. “I told them my story, and they said, ‘you need to sign up for our program,’ and we built a great relationship with the team. They’ve helped us in so many ways.”
By enrolling in IDEA Mississauga’s Starter Company Plus program, and later its Step-Up Program, Sahil says he was connected with experts in intellectual property, accounting, marketing and scaling, all of which have proven instrumental in DIA Lab’s rapid growth.
Thus far the company has raised $500,000 in non-dilutive funding, hired full time staff, and won more pitch competitions than Sahil can count.
While financial success is important to Sahil, he says he is also inspired by his mother’s passion for helping patients.
“None of the financial value inspires me as much as hearing that my product or my service or my expertise is helping or saving lives,” he says. “That’s what moves me the most.”
To learn more about DIA Labs, visit their website here.
