At 16, Sankalp Joshi Is Building an International Sourcing and Distribution Company
Most 16-year-olds do not spend their afternoons in meetings with CEOs, factory owners and corporate buyers. Sankalp Joshi has spent much of the past year and a half doing exactly that.
Joshi was a football player in Forsyth County when his father's work moved the family to the Philippines. He enrolled at International School Manila, and the people around him changed what he thought was possible. "I realized all these people would be a great influence on me, and I shouldn't waste my time while I'm here," he said.
What began in Manila now spans borders, with Veritas Horizon sourcing and moving goods between various markets. (Image: Rey Melvin Caraan/Unsplash)
He started with a clothing brand that caught on fast through fundraisers and sponsorships. "It was a huge brand in the Philippines at the time," he said. But the label was tied to a place, and Joshi was already looking past it. What drew him was not the product on the front end but the machinery behind it, the factories and contracts and logistics of getting something made and moved.
"The more boring the business, the better the opportunity," he said. "When everyone chases passion, real money is often made where nobody is looking."
That thinking pushed him from selling clothes to supplying them. His own school became his first corporate client; an order he filled through a manufacturing relationship he had built while producing his own line. Landing it mattered more than the margin. "I didn't mind not making as much profit," he said. "I just wanted to close the deal with the school."
From there, Joshi went looking for rooms he had no obvious reason to be in. He began messaging founders, CEOs and senior executives, not to pitch them but to understand them. "I never went into those meetings trying to sell someone something," he said. "I wanted to understand what they were building, learn how they thought, and see where I could create value."
The conversations tended to lead somewhere. A meeting became a referral, a referral became an introduction, and the relationships themselves became part of how the company grew. One of those connections led to a spot in a program he describes as a Top 100 CEOs cohort, something he compares to an MBA guidance batch.
That network now underpins a working client list. Veritas Horizon, Joshi’s startup company, counts corporate partners across manufacturing, apparel and food, among them Pepsi Philippines, for which the company has developed a corporate supply relationship with.
Veritas Horizon's distribution partnership with Farmton Foods brings the Indian manufacturer's potato products to US retailers. (Image: Eric Prouzet/Unsplash)
The Thread Connecting It All
The lines of business are easy to mistake for a scatter of unrelated ventures: branded apparel, corporate uniforms, frozen potatoes. Joshi sees one company. Each is a version of the same thing, connecting the people who make products with the people who buy and distribute them, and building the infrastructure to move goods across borders.
Veritas Horizon started in merchandise and apparel sourcing, moved into corporate supply, and is now pushing into retail and food distribution. After he returned to Georgia, Joshi added the food line. The company serves as a distribution partner for Farmton Foods, an Indian manufacturer, moving potato products such as fries and hash browns. Some ship under the Veritas name and some as private labels for retailers. Joshi talks about the food business as a global play rather than an American one, though for now the concrete footprint is the Farmton pipeline into the United States.
Letting the work speak
The hardest part is not logistics. At 16, Joshi knows his age can raise doubts before a meeting starts, and he has stopped trying to talk people out of them. "My age might get someone's attention, but it can't be the reason they stay at the table," he said. "At some point, the value has to speak for itself." He lets the client list do that work.
Summer gives him room to work full time, and he has no plans to ease off when classes resume. "I wouldn't slow things down. That's never been my trajectory," he said. The question in front of him is not what to build next but how far the business he already has can stretch: more volume, more distribution partners, more markets.
Joshi has his sights set on Georgia Tech, which he calls his dream school, and which would put him a few miles from Tech Square. If his trajectory holds, the Tech Square community may know his name well before he arrives.