We sit down with Hayden Smith, founder and CEO of FeX Energy, to unpack why energy storage matters to the energy transition and how their new iron-based storage solution could challenge incumbent technologies like lithium-ion.
FeX is developing an Iron Arc reactor that has the potential to hold energy for days or weeks, and release it as clean energy and high-temperature heat that could power industries like mining, provide heating for buildings, or balance load for the grid. By using one of Earth’s most abundant and affordable materials, FeX aims to close the gap between intermittent renewables and reliable, dispatchable power.
In this conversation, we cover:
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Corey Ellis is the co-founder and CEO of Growcer, an Ottawa-based company building modular farms & food infrastructure used by communities, schools, and grocers across Canada and around the world.
We talk about the impact our food system is having on the climate and how vertical farming can help solve those problems. We also talk about lessons learned from the vertical farming hype cycle, Growcer’s $30M infrastructure fund, and building a company for the long-term.
About Corey
Corey started Growcer in 2014 with his co-founder Alida Burke after seeing firsthand how northern communities struggle with food security. What began as a social enterprise project in Nunavut grew into a mission-driven company tackling food affordability, waste, and access.
Growcer has deployed over 800 farms worldwide, acquired its US competitor Freight Farms, and launched a $30M Growcer Fund to finance climate infrastructure.
In this conversation, we cover:
7:40 - What’s broken in our food system and why boring problems like distribution and shelf life matter
11:03 - How modular farms cut food waste and fertilizer use - but aren’t a silver bullet
16:51 - How Growcer turned customer criticism into their best R&D engine
19:19 - What real food sovereignty looks like when communities own their infrastructure
24:34 - The “vertical farming” hype cycle and why most players got it wrong
39:37 - Borrowing lessons from real estate to finance climate infrastructure
50:59 - Solving hard problems and building culture from first principles
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Kevin Krausert is the co-founder and CEO of Avatar Innovations, a Canadian venture studio reshaping how energy technologies are developed, funded, and scaled. From Calgary to Houston and beyond, Avatar is working with industry insiders to turn ideas into deployable solutions for the energy transition.
Kevin brings a unique perspective to climate tech. He began his career on the rigs in northern Alberta, became CEO of one of Canada’s largest drilling companies, and later co-founded Avatar to bridge the gap between researchers, corporate engineers, and operators. His goal: create a new model of innovation that can move the needle on emissions while making economic sense.
Talking Points
You’ll walk away with a clear-eyed look at where energy innovation is headed, what models might actually work in Canada’s climate tech landscape, and how founders can better navigate this uncertain but opportunity-rich moment.
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Nelson Switzer is the co-founder of Climate Innovation Capital and author of The Gigacorn Hunter. Nelson’s spent his career at the intersection of capital markets and sustainability, helping corporations, institutional investors, and governments allocate dollars where they can drive the greatest climate impact
Talking points:
(5:11) The fifth industrial revolution. Nelson explains why the decarbonization of everything is not just a trend but an economic and existential shift.
(9:34) “Dollars in motion transform entire sectors.” Why Nelson believes capital allocation - not philanthropy or reports - has the greatest power to drive decarbonization.
(13:31) The carbon qualification model. A tactical framework using scale, speed, and cost to evaluate whether a climate solution can bend the carbon curve.
(21:42) Building trust with investors. Advice for founders on how they can build trust with potential investors - even if they don’t have totally complete data.
(31:13) Opportunities in today’s market correction. Why Nelson sees discounted valuations, dry powder, and surging demand as the setup for the next successful vintage of climate funds.
(37:40) Canada’s commercialization gap. Why Canadian corporates need to stop piloting and start buying if we want to build global-scale climate companies.Stay in the know on Canada’s clean economy.
About Nelson: Before founding Climate Innovation Capital, Nelson led sustainability initiatives inside global giants like Nestlé and advised some of the world’s largest investors on ESG risks and opportunities. His book, The Gigacorn Hunter, lays out a practical playbook for climate investors navigating one of the most urgent - and profitable - frontiers of our time.
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We sit down with Emily Farrar, co-founder at Genuine Taste, a startup tackling one of the biggest limitations in plant-based food: flavour.
Genuine Taste are developing cultivated animal fats grown from cells in compact bioreactors. Their goal? Deliver the taste, texture, and nutritional profile of real fat - without the emissions or animal suffering.
About Emily: With a background in climate tech consulting and civil engineering, Emily co-founded Genuine Taste alongside a biophysics expert to define the future of food and build a more sustainable alternative to animal agriculture. They’ve already secured early partnerships and are scaling toward commercial pilots.
We talk about:
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Apoorv Sinha is the co-founder and CEO of Carbon Upcycling Technologies, a Calgary-based startup turning industrial waste and captured carbon into low-cement.
Cement is a huge part of modern life but also one of the biggest sources of carbon pollution. Carbon Upcycling helps cement producers lower their emissions by replacing traditional cement with low-carbon alternatives made from industrial or mine waste and reacting it with CO2 to permanently lock away carbon.
Their tech slots right into existing plants and helps cement makers localize their supply chains, making it easier and cheaper to cut emissions while building the infrastructure Canada needs.
About Apoorv
Apoorv is a chemical engineer by trade and has extensive experience in conventional energy.
Since launching Carbon Upcycling in 2014, he’s built partnerships with some of the biggest cement companies in the world, including CRH, Titan, and CEMEX, and just closed a major funding round led by Builders Vision.
Talking Points
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Morgan Lehtinen and Sebastian Alamillo are the co-founders of RXN Hub, a new facility to help ChemTech ventures scale from lab to market.
RXN Hub is tackling one of the biggest and least-addressed challenges in climate tech: how to scale chemical technologies from the lab to commercial scale.
Whether you're working on carbon capture, energy storage, or green industrial processes, there’s often nowhere to go once your research is too big for a university but too early for a full-scale plant.
Morgan and Sebastian have both lived that experience as chemtech founders, and now they’re building the infrastructure they wish they had to make scaling up faster, easier, and more cost effective.
In our conversation, you’ll learn about:
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Oliver David (OD) Krieg is the President of Intelligent City, a Vancouver-based company redefining how we build housing using mass timber, advanced manufacturing, and parametric design. Intelligent City is working to solve Canada’s climate and housing crises.
About Intelligent City: Intelligent City manufactures prefabricated building panels out of renewable mass timber. Their platform enables faster, lower-carbon, and higher-quality housing construction that can scale across Canadian cities.
About OD: With a background in architecture, robotics, and computational design, OD was one of the earliest team members at Intelligent City. He’s helped guide the company from early research and prototyping to full-scale manufacturing, including recent projects in Vancouver and Toronto. Their work is pushing the frontier of what’s possible in Canada’s construction and climate sectors.
In our conversation, we discuss:
You’ll gain firsthand insight into what it takes to bring climate tech into a sector that can be slow to change and adapt, and why prefab construction might finally be ready to scale in Canada.
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Canada needs to retrofit millions of homes - fast. But outdated tools, confusing incentives, and a narrow focus on ROI are holding us back.
In this episode, Arman Mottaghi, CEO of Properate, lays out what it will take to bring retrofits to scale. We explore how Properate is rebuilding the software stack for home upgrades, why health and comfort are the real drivers of adoption, and how single-family homes - an overlooked part of our built environment - could become a climate linchpin.
We cover:
- The hidden impact of low-rise residential buildings
- What’s broken in Canada’s retrofit ecosystem
- How Properate is bringing energy assessments into the 21st century
- Why indoor air quality could be the secret weapon to unlock more retrofits
- Navigating ROI without consumer carbon pricing
- Creating feedback loops across governments, homeowner, and contractors
- Bootstrapping a climate tech company without VC funding
This is a conversation about the systems change behind climate tech and what it takes to create momentum in a market.
→ Check out the full show notes and resources on our website
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Nyla Ahmad is the COO at Alvéole, a company helping commercial real estate go nature-positive, starting with rooftop beehives. What began as a tool for tenant engagement has evolved into a scalable biodiversity monitoring platform, combining physical infrastructure with environmental data collection.
Nyla brings a background in media and telecom, having held senior leadership roles at Rogers and OWL Kids, before making a career pivot into sustainability. At Alvéole, she’s helping property owners prepare for the next wave of ESG disclosures, turn rooftops into biodiversity sensors, and reconnect people with nature.
Learn more at https://www.alveole.buzz/
In our conversation, we explore:
You'll gain insight into how real estate owners are starting to measure nature-related risk, how Alvéole blends tech and hands-on experiences to drive action, and why connecting people with nature might be the most overlooked lever in the climate fight.
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Alex Deslauriers is the founder and CEO at FireSwarm Solutions, a startup revolutionizing wildfire suppression. FireSwarm is developing AI-powered swarm algorithms that enable heavy-lift drones to fight wildfires.
Alex brings over 25 years of experience in aerospace engineering and aviation software (including work with the US Navy on F-18 programs) before pivoting to wildfire tech after losing his own property to the Gun Lake fires in 2023. Now, he’s applying his extensive aviation experience and a talented team to tackle this growing climate challenge.
In our conversation, we explore:
You'll learn about how wildfire response works on the ground, how autonomous drones make fire suppression safer and more effective, and the intersection between climate tech and national security.
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Marc-André Forget is the founder and CEO of dcbel, a startup transforming our relationship with energy at home.
dcbel enables homeowners to easily manage their solar, EV charging, and battery storage, integrating them into their intelligent home energy system - Ara.
dcbel recently secured a $55 million funding round led by the Canada Growth Fund, and is now deploying dcbel across North America and Europe.
Marc-André brings over a decade of energy sector expertise to the conversation, and shares his perspective on building dcbel, how our relationship with energy is changing, and the transformation he sees on the horizon.
In our conversation, we explore:
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Mike Kelland is the co-founder and CEO of Planetary, a carbon removal startup that’s aiming to draw down gigatonnes of carbon from the atmosphere by accelerating the ocean’s natural, carbon absorbing abilities.
While the world urgently needs to reduce the amount of carbon pollution going into the atmosphere, it’s also becoming clear that we need to remove our historic emissions if we want to limit the worst effects of climate change.
Planetary is working to draw down some of the 8 gigatonnes of CO2 we need to remove every year by 2025 to hit our climate goals. Ocean-based carbon removal is relatively new with lots of technical and measurement problems to be solved, but it’s one of the highest potential pathways for gigatonne-scale removal.
I sat down with Mike in person in Ottawa to talk about Planetary’s approach to carbon removal, the challenges of measuring carbon removal in the open ocean, and how they plan to scale physical plants on coastlines around the world.
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At this year’s Carbon Removal Day in Ottawa, we caught up with experts working across the life cycle of carbon removal to discuss the state of carbon removal, keys to scaling up, and Canada’s leadership potential.
Our Guests
[0:54] Phil De Luna is the Chief Science & Commercial Officer at Deep Sky, a project developer and owner-operator of carbon removal projects.
[7:12] Carson Fong is a Program Manager at the Business Renewables Centre Canada and the Pembina Institute’s Carbon Dioxide Removal Centre.
[12:20] Jane Kearns - Partner at Evok Innovations, a Canadian venture capital firm investing in the energy and industrial transition.
[18:30] Genny Shaw - Co-founder and CEO at Gaia Refinery, a carbon removal startup that merges direct air capture (DAC) with biomass carbon removal.
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Matt Loszak is the co-founder and CEO of Aalo Atomics, a company building factory mass-manufactured nuclear power plants, purpose built for AI data centres.
The explosive growth of AI is driving up data centre energy consumption, and big tech players are looking for reliable, low-carbon energy sources to step up. Aalo’s small, modular reactor systems are purpose built for the needs of data centres and use a mass-manufacturing approach to lower costs and project timelines.
In this conversation, we explore why nuclear power is experiencing a resurgence after decades of limited deployment, the advantages of small modular reactors versus traditional large nuclear plants, how nuclear safety has improved with modern reactor designs and fuel types, Matt’s journey from SaaS to deeptech founder, and much more.
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In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Christine Gabardo, co-founder and CTO of CERT Systems, a climate tech startup working to produce essential chemicals without fossil fuels.
CERT's technology takes CO2 from industrial carbon capture systems and turns it into sustainable, high value chemicals like ethylene using water and electricity.
The CERT team brings decades of experience in electrochemistry, materials science, and engineering, and was the first in the world to demonstrate the conversion of industrial emissions into ethylene as a finalist in the NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE.
In our conversation, we unpack how CERT Systems' technology works, how it could be a pathway for producing sustainable aviation fuel, lessons learned from the Carbon XPRIZE, scaling up 10,000x, why people underestimate the market for sustainable ethylene, building effective pilot partnerships, and more.
More info and show notes available here.
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Our guest today is Rashmi Prakash, founder of Aruna Revolution. Aruna is a sustainable fibre company making compostable menstrual pads that are better for our bodies and the planet.
We talk about the intersection of climate and human health, how they’re turning agricultural byproducts like stems into sustainable, high performance fibres, and Rashmi’s journey from medical engineer to startup founder.
Talking points:
Episode Notes
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In today’s episode, we’re diving into the world of commercial building retrofits.
We're joined byChristopher Naismith, founder and CEO ofAudette, a decarbonization platform for commercial real estate asset managers.
Audette enables retrofits at scale by bringing data and software to what has traditionally been a manual, building-by-building process, turning it into a data-driven strategy and with the capital plans to make them a reality.
We cover:
Episode notes:
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In this episode, we dive into the complex world of climate risk and how it's reshaping global financial markets.
Our guest is Dr. Ron Dembo, founder and CEO ofRiskThinking.AI. RiskThinking.AI leverages their digital twin of the Earth to offer the only probability-based, integrating different climate scenarios, expert insights, and millions of data points to measure and model climate financial risk. See it in action atask.riskthinking.ai.
In our conversation, we cover
About Dr. Ron Dembo
Dr. Dembo has made significant contributions to mathematical algorithms and finance, and is a leading authority on financial risk management. Dr. Dembo worked on methods for solving large-scale nonlinear equations as a professor at Yale and a visiting scholar at MIT, and was honoured as a Lifetime Fellow of the Fields Institute of Mathematics in 2007. Dr. Dembo previously founded Algorithmics (acquired by Fitch Ratings), an enterprise risk management platform for the world’s top banks, and Zerofootprint, one of the first companies focused on measuring and reducing carbon footprints.
Episode Notes
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Aaron Guan is the founder ofNeptune Nanotechnologies, a bio-nano material startup that is converting crab and other crustacean shells from the seafood industry into nano-material additives. These additives can dramatically increase the strength, water resistance and fire retardancy of paper packaging and other materials so that they can compete in areas where plastics have historically won out - all while being fully biodegradable.
In our conversation, we unpack how nanocrystals function and why they have such incredible potential; Aaron’s vision for a future with fully biodegradable products; and the impact that traditional plastics and additives have on human health and the climate.
We also talk about scaling a hardtech business from lab to commercial scale, overcoming green premiums in a highly commoditized market, and lessons learned from Aaron’s first biomaterials company.
Episode Links
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