Business Minor Spotlight: Sana Hashim
Navigating a busy course load and launching a start-up is stressful for many students – but for Sana Hashim, it carried an added layer of gratitude rooted in her past. Having grown up in Afghanistan, where girls’ education is banned, every lecture, assignment, and late-night study session at UTM felt like a privilege she refused to take lightly.
On October 23, 2025, I sat down with Sana Hashim, co-founder and CEO of Universe Technologies, and graduate from the IMI Business Minor. Hashim was born and raised in Afghanistan, where female education is suppressed. “I love being a student, and I think it's a great privilege. I come from a country where girls' education is banned right now, so education was never something I took for granted,” Hashim explained.
She majored in Geospatial Data Science and double-minored in Diaspora and Transnational Studies and Business, Science and Entrepreneurship at IMI. She was excited to express her ‘hot take’ among Business Minor students. “I loved the accounting and the finance course. I know it's quite an unpopular opinion. A lot of the other students tend to...find it quite difficult, but I think it was the one that had so many essential skills. You could immediately see its application in a lot of ways.”
The skills Hashim gained through accounting, finance and other business courses that she took during her science degree tremendously helped her when she launched her own startup, Universe Technologies. She described the knowledge she gained at UTM as the intellectual foundation from which she was able to launch her start-up. “Let's say, accounting or finance, like a balance sheet or an income sheet, knowing when you're in a profit or loss. Those kinds of things are fundamentals that may seem quite daunting if you're starting fresh and don't have that knowledge. You may be tempted to go out and outsource it or find someone to do those things for you, but because I had that knowledge, I knew I had that foundation, and I could use that foundation to go and tailor it and use it for whatever else I needed to for my business,” she explained.
Hashim reflected on her experience on campus and her decision to launch her company to help students with the struggles of finding the correct information and resources. “I think it was quite shocking to me when I came to university to see and notice how much students struggled. [...] I created a chatbot to help students find all the resources they could, and to maximize their university years, because I realized a lot of the students were struggling, as they're working multiple jobs, they're away from their families, and they've left their home countries.”
UNIverse began during Hashim's third year, starting as a small idea that grew through months of validation, team building, product development, and countless hours of testing, demoing, and gathering feedback, until it was finally ready to launch. UNIverse works as an advising chatbot and analytics platform built for education institutions. It gives students instant answers to any campus-related question pulled from their campus resources, while offering educational institutions with insights to improve their services, reduce manual work, and save time. “To just see that spark and light bulb go off with the students, because they asked a question about like enrolment or academics, and they immediately got an answer. A lot of them turned to me and were like, ‘You know what? I've been spending the past few days, for hours, feeling lost and confused and trying to search and find these answers,” she explained.
The chatbot Hashim created was to fill a gap in the students' knowledge of their institution’s best practices and help remind students of the reasons why they are enrolled in university. For her, the startup became a reminder of why students pursue higher education in the first place. “It felt like we were all racing up a ladder without knowing what waited at the top. I had to come back to the foundation, and ask myself: Why am I here? What am I trying to gain from this experience? Once you understand your ‘why,’ your path becomes much clearer.”
Sana Hashim has won numerous awards at UTM including the Program Performance Award for the IMI Minor in Business, Science and Entrepreneurship, International Scholar Award, RBC Scholarship for Diversity and Innovation in Technology, and was nominated for the Founders Gold Medal by the Department.
To learn more about the Minor in Business, Science and Entrepreneurship at IMI, please visit the website or contact imi.businessminor@utoronto.ca.
To learn more about Sana Hashim’s journey, please visit her LinkedIn.
