Growing up in India Rishabh Gupta always wanted to start his own company but was discouraged from doing so by well-meaning relatives. “Everyone in my family works for someone,” he says. “Starting something of their own was always considered very risky, so it was not encouraged.” Instead, Gupta studied architecture and began his career at a major architecture firm, where, among other things, he helped the company respond to requests for proposals, or RFPs, from prospective clients.
In 2017 Gupta moved to Canada and earned an MBA at Schulich, before returning to the architecture, engineering and construction industry at a major Canadian firm where he was once again working on RFPs. “Honestly, it was the most difficult job I ever did,” he says. “I spent sleepless nights doing those because you’re churning out client-facing documents, so It has to be perfect — your revenue depends on it — so it’s very high pressure.” Finally, in 2020, the pandemic gave Gupta an excuse to dabble in entrepreneurship. First, he built a marketplace for sustainable products and services. Then in late 2021 he launched an augmented reality company called Actuality to help online shoppers visualize products in their homes.
Around that time Gupta saw a LinkedIn post that mentioned IDEA Mississauga’s Step-Up program for entrepreneurs and decided to do some research. “And then I was in Square One, and I remember walking into [the IDEA Mississauga office] and asking, ‘what is this?’ And they told me,” he says. “Then I thought, okay, maybe it’s a good idea to go through the program, so we applied and we got in.” Soon after starting the five-month program in late 2023, however, Gupta realized that the original idea behind Actuality had to confront a major challenge.
“It was a vitamin, not a pain killer.” he says. “If I go to an art gallery and say, ‘would you like to incorporate augmented reality into your platform so people can see the artwork on their walls before they buy it?’ they would say yeah, it would be cool, but it’s not mission critical for them. They can live without it.”
During the Step-Up program Gupta and his co-founder Hash Pujara met with investors, mentors and thought leaders who helped the pair refine their approach. At first, they leveraged those connections to provide municipal governments with augmented reality models of future construction projects.
“During that session it was getting clearer to us that AR is a cool technology, but it would be very difficult for a startup to really make a mark and create a sustained competitive advantage within this field,” Gupta says. “They helped us recognize that, given my background with RFPs and connections, maybe it would be a good idea to pivot into an RFP response platform specifically for the construction industry.”
In December of 2024 Actuality abandoned its AR platform and relaunched as a solution that helps construction companies respond to RFPs faster and better using AI. “Responding to RFPs is a very time consuming and resource intensive process. For many companies, it could take upwards of 200 hours, and $12,000 to $15,000 to just respond to one,” Gupta says. “When we onboard a customer, we inject all their previous RFPs, we take in all the company information, so that when a new one comes in, we create a fully designed package within minutes to serve as a first draft.”
Actuality not only saves these businesses hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars, but it also allows them to respond to more RFPs, with higher quality applications. “It has reduced the RFP response time by 50% to 60%,” Gupta says. Gupta says Actuality is gearing up to raise a seed round of between $1.5 and $2 million, with the goal of increasing revenue by 15 times in the next 18 to 24 months.
Now that the company is well on its way to becoming a success Gupta says his family feels differently about entrepreneurship. “When I first started, they used to tell me, ‘Don’t tell anyone that you are doing something on your own,’” he says. “Now they are telling everyone how proud they are.”
To learn more about Actuality, click here.
To learn more about the IDEA Step-up Program, click here.
