Josh Supan of xpanse Future Forward, Future Unicorn

XPANSE is on its way to becoming a Unicorn tech company, with Unicorn meaning a startup valued at $1 billion.

The man who saw this through is Josh Supan, the 27-year-old CEO of xpanse. A business graduate from Ateneo de Davao and a former retail leasing manager of SM, he found a problem to fix. As he sold spaces to brickand-mortar brands, he realized that eyeballs are limited to the given space and that e-commerce will definitely broaden a brands reach considering you can shop online 24/7, 365 days a year.

With the goal to increase “.ph” brands, he recruited his childhood friend, David Marquez, one of the top Full Stack Developers in the country. Marquez in turn, brought in Jeremiah Abalos to take care of front-end interface and services.

The first six months, they focused on developing noah, a cloudbased system that handles the order data to expedite the shipping process. Afterwards, they started scaling up manpower-wise to help develop xpanse.

“This was my brainchild and I knew I had to be fully invested in it from the beginning,”said Supan. “The next hurdle was to convince brands to go online. I told them to take a chance on us, and they did.

“The core of xpanse is e-commerce, but we adapt to what works for the client.”

At present, there are a lot of website development and shipping companies, but none have married both concepts as effectively as xpanse. Supan saw this as an ideal space to be in and thus xpanse was born at a third of the price of its competitors and a company that doesn’t just create websites, it fulfills the order and ships it automatically.

Looking forward, Supan is set on an asian expansion and hopes to be a major e-commerce enabler in Asia. Things are already in play in order for that to happen as they are about to open the first round of investments.