Helcim CEO | Nic Beique on Hacker Culture

"I told the team we had six months to live."Nic Beique founded Helcim in 2008 as a 23-year-old self-taught coder. For ten years, he ran it as a reseller in the shadow of a bank. In 2020, he and his team made the call to pivot, build their own independent payments stack, and take on Stripe, Square, and Moneris head-on.Three years later, in the middle of the Series B fundraise, the company was running out of cash. He told the team they had six months to live.A month after that, they closed $27 million.In this conversation, Nic walks through the full 15-year arc of Helcim. The Texas-born Montreal-raised origin, the years in the shadow, the pivot, the crunch, and where the company is heading next: a publicly traded Calgary-based anchor for Canadian tech.This is the audio version of the Tech Thursday Calgary fireside originally recorded May 2026.Read the recap on the Calgary Tech Newsletter at calgarytech.substack.com.Tech Thursday is Canada's largest tech community event series, hosted weekly across Calgary, Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Ottawa.