This 24-year-old used Snapchat to launch a startup so successful, he turned down jobs at Facebook and Uber — all while fighting cancer.

(Fiix cofounder and cancer survivor Khallil Mangalji.Khallil Mangalji) 

24-year-old Khallil Mangalji is a happy guy. He just closed a $1.8 million round of venture funding for his two-year-old startup, Fiix, and got some good news about his health.

The cancer tumor he's been fighting for the past year while launching his startup is in retreat and the prognosis for a full recovery is good, he told Business Insider.

His young life is a reminder that good things often require hard choices, teamwork and, sometimes, fighting with everything you've got.

An annoyance leads to a startup

Mangalji is CTO and one of three cofounders of a Toronto startup called Fiix, which sends licensed mechanics out on house calls to do minor auto repairs like installing new brake pads and changing tires or oil.

Fiix was launched two years ago by Mangalji and his two college buddies Zain Manji and Arif Bhanji, who would hang out and dream up apps to generate some cash while they finished their computer science degrees. They had already tried a few things, none of them successful, like an "Airbnb for weddings" and "a magnetic weight lifting app," Mangalji tells us.

But on this particular day, one of them had to deal with getting snow tires put on his car. The local shops were all booked up, so he was forced to hire someone off of Kijiji, Canada's version of Craigslist, who was coming to his house to do the work.

When the mechanic was done they looked at each other and said, "That was much easier than going to a shop. What if we could build an app to do that for everyone?" Mangalji recalled. 

And so their startup was born, initially called Tire Swap. The guys rounded up some licensed mechanics, built an app to send them to people's houses to change tires, and were shocked that in the first week "80 people paid us to use the service," he said. By the end of the month, it had serviced "hundreds" of customers, he said.

Soon customers started asking if the mechanics could do more stuff, so Tire Swap became Fiix. Today, Fiix has completed 4,000 repairs for people, is on track to do $1.2 million worth of repairs this year, and keeps three mechanics so busy they left their shops to work for Fiix customers full-time, he said. All told there's 15 mechanics registered on the system, he said.

Fiix is only in Toronto, but with that nearly $2 million in seed money led by Javelin Venture Partners (backers of Thumbtack and a bunch of other auto-tech startups), the founders hope to start expanding to other areas.

Snapchat leads to $20,000 and Y Combinator

Fiix bolted onto the startup scene in a highly unusual way. 

Mangalji was initially going the traditional route with his career. In college he landed prestigious internships at Pivotal Labs, Apple, BitPesa (a bitcoin/blockchain startup in Africa), and Facebook. When he graduated he landed job offers from Facebook, Uber, Medium, and others, he said.

Mangalji is convinced he landed so many offers because he could show them Fiix. They were interested in how it was built and were especially impressed it was earning revenue.

By Julie Bort.

Full story at Yahoo News.