CRWN.ai helps utilities prevent wildfires sparked by failing grid infrastructure.

These fires are rare, but they're catastrophic. In 2018, a single failure on PG&E's grid sparked California's deadliest wildfire, killed 85 people, and pushed the utility into bankruptcy. The fire made wildfire liability a board-level risk for utilities everywhere.

And it keeps getting harder: transmission lines are aging, wildfire seasons are getting more intense, and rising electricity demand means even more infrastructure needs to get built.

Most utilities still catch failing lines the same way they did fifty years ago: a lineman driving the corridor once every one to eight years, looking for problems.

Brittany Courvoisier-Nicol, co-founder and Head of Product, and James Playford, Chief Operating Officer are working to close this gap at CRWN.ai.

CRWN.ai builds sensors that clip onto power poles and listen, using acoustic and radio-frequency data to catch a failing insulator months or years before it sparks. Instead of one data point every several years, utilities get continuous, real-time awareness of what's actually at risk, and where to send crews first.

TALKING POINTS

• Why CRWN.ai pivoted out of a defence-tech sister company and back into grid resilience

• How wildfire liability, EV load, and data centre demand are colliding on utility boards' risk radar right now

• What it actually takes to get a risk-averse utility to put their hardware on live infrastructure

• Why the funding model that works for defence doesn't exist yet for Canadian climate tech

• How CRWN.ai incorporates Indigenous knowledge into wildfire-risk modelling, and where it's outperforming Western data

• What validating sensor readings against a lineman's lived experience on the ground actually looks like

Canada is home to world class researchers and institutions. But that potential doesn’t always translate into commercial impact. Not because the technology fails, but because the lab-to-market handoff breaks down.

For researchers building climate solutions — battery chemistry, carbon removal, advanced materials — it means negotiating licensing terms with your university, securing early capital, and picking up a whole set of business skills academics rarely get exposed to.

Dr. Kyle Briggs has seen this challenge from the inside. He founded Northern Nanopore Instruments, a nanotechnology company that was acquired in 2023 after bootstrapping from idea to acquisition without using dilutive investment.

That experience led to SAIL — the Simple Agreement for Innovation Licensing — a standardized alternative to the ad hoc equity-and-royalty deals Canadian universities cut with startups.

Kyle is now the co-founder of the SAIL Fund, a venture philanthropic fund that supports companies turning publicly funded research into socioeconomic impact. He also writes about Canadian innovation policy at CanInnovate.

We unpack each step of the R&D pipeline and where things break; the often conflicting incentives at play from universities, VCs, and public funding bodies, and what it would take — structurally and politically — to turn Canada's climate R&D strengths into working companies.

In this episode:

• Where a researcher's idea gets stuck on the way to becoming a company
• Why U.S.-style tech-transfer licenses backfire in a market without deep risk capital
• How SAIL's convertible-debt structure realigns incentives for founders, universities, and investors
• The case for venture philanthropy — and what the UK's already figured out
• Why targeting a 98% failure rate can be sound policy, not a red flag
• Why tracking inputs instead of outcomes is holding Canadian innovation policy back
• What has to change first — and who has to move — to stop losing IP abroad

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Show notes & links: https://climatetechcanada.ca/p/podcast-lab-to-market-kyle-briggs

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The story in corporate sustainability right now is all about retreat: voluntary pledges walked back, advocacy groups shutting down, banks dropping emissions targets. But underneath that noise, mandatory disclosure rules in the EU and around the world are creating obligations no company can undo with a press release.

That means ESG data needs to be as rigorous and auditable as financial reporting, and large companies are taking it seriously - even if they aren’t talking about it as loudly.

We sat down with Charles Assaf, CEO of Novisto, a Montreal-based company that's raised $55M+ to turn scattered sustainability data into a single, audit-ready system of record.

As disclosure regulation tightens globally, that infrastructure is becoming as essential to compliance teams as financial reporting systems are to finance teams.

In our conversation we cover:

• What's actually happening in the field - beyond the ESG backlash headlines
• The shift from voluntary pledges to regulation-driven demand
• What the EU's CSRD actually requires and how Canadian companies get pulled in from the outside
• Why asset owners and pension funds haven't changed course, even as public pledges disappear
• What "audit-ready" data really means, and how ESG reporting is maturing the way financial reporting once did
• Building a global enterprise company from Montreal, and why AI raises the stakes on owning trusted data

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• Feedback or guest ideas: hello @ climatetechcanada.ca

Up to 50% of industrial heat is wasted. For decades, cheap electricity meant nobody bothered capturing it. That's changing as industry looks for more power, better efficiency, and lower emissions.

Local energy networks turn that waste into value, letting neighbouring facilities trade surplus heat instead of losing it. The obstacle isn't proving it works - it's getting industrial neighbours to coordinate.

Léo Lamy-Laliberté and Daniel Bastien are co-founders of Local Energy (www.localenergy.ai), a Mila-backed startup that's accelerating projects and optimizing them for maximum efficiency. They're using machine learning to deliver better returns and unlock even more ambitious projects.

What we cover:

• Why cheap electricity left industrial waste heat uncaptured for decades
• The coordination problem: why this is a governance gap, not a technology gap
• Local Energy's two tools: "Builder" to design a network, "Operator" to run it
• Modelling 32 million project parameters instead of using spreadsheets

• How Canada compares to Denmark and Germany, and what policy shift would close the gap
• The path from a handful of Canadian sites to ten thousand

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Canada's built environment accounts for roughly 40% of national emissions - and building materials, one of the least-discussed corners of climate tech, are where a lot of that carbon actually lives.

In this episode, we look at the buyer side of the equation: how large, industrial customers that are producing building materials today approach low-carbon innovation.

Dennis Wilson is VP of ESG and Managing Director of Circular Economy Solutions at Saint-Gobain North America, one of the world's oldest and largest building materials companies.

Dennis sits on both sides of the innovation equation: he runs Saint-Gobain's internal decarbonization strategy and its external startup partnerships.

In this conversation:

• How an ESG target turns into deployed capital
• Why circular solutions are on the top of Dennis' priority list

• What Saint-Gobain looks for before greenlighting a startup partnership
• Balancing pilots with the need for solutions at mass-scale
• What founders get wrong and why "we have a solution" isn't enough
• Where pilot-to-procurement relationships break down, and what separates the ones that survive

It's an inside look at how industrial players think about integrating new solutions and decarbonizing at scale.

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A generation of climate tech was built on assumptions that no longer hold up. AI primitives and cutting-edge models are commoditizing software, creating new questions around the future of climate software.

We sit down with an investor and founder to unpack what the Saaspocalypse means for climate tech.

Geordan Hankinson is a Partner at Renewal Funds, a Vancouver-based impact VC with a track record of climate software exits including Opus One Solutions (acquired by ABB). Mike Hejmej is the CEO of Senpilot, an AI-native platform for electric utilities.

Geordan has backed and exited climate startups under the old software playbook, while Mike is building squarely inside the new one, betting that regulated, high-stakes deployment environments create a moat that a model alone can't replicate.

What we cover:

• What the "SaaSpocalypse" actually means for climate software
• Why the old software playbook is hitting a ceiling
• Stress testing the idea that anyone can build production-ready software in hours or days
• How utility buyers are actually evaluating build-vs-buy right now
• Where moats still hold: physical infrastructure, regulated trust, and proprietary context
• A speculative new playbook for climate software founders building today

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• Show notes: https://climatetechcanada.ca/p/podcast-is-climate-software-dead⁠⁠⁠
• Subscribe to our weekly newsletter⁠⁠⁠ for Canadian climate tech funding, news, and trends: https://climatetechcanada.ca/subscribe
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Cover art: Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

Canada's industrial carbon pricing system just went through its biggest redesign since it launched, trading ambition for stability. Depending on who you ask, the deal is either a major unlock - or a major step backwards.

We sat down with Etienne Rainville, VP for Central Canada at Clean Prosperity, a Canadian think tank that's been one of the most consistent voices for market-based climate policy. He's been making the case for carbon contracts for difference and was actively engaged as the Ottawa-Alberta negotiations unfolded.

We unpack what the certainty-price trade-off really means, how it impacts investment decisions - and where climate policy goes from here.

What we cover:

• Why the industrial carbon market was broken - and what the gap between the $95 headline price and $30 trading price actually means
• What changed: the new headline price schedule, the price floor, and how carbon contracts for difference work
• Why the floor alone isn't enough - and what CCfDs do that regulation can't
• What this means for founders and investors evaluating capital commitments
• Whether renegotiating the system undermines its long-term credibility
• How this deal impacts provinces beyond Alberta
• And where we go from here

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• Feedback or guest ideas: hello @ climatetechcanada.ca

Climate startups face a commercialization gap: They've proven the science, but are too risky for VCs - and too commercial for a government grant.

It's a gap that philanthropic capital is well-positioned to close.

Galith Levy is the CEO and co-founder of the Climate Solutions Prize, a dedicated philanthropic platform for climate innovation, deploying capital at the moment it matters most. Since 2020, they’ve deployed more than $12M in awards and unlocked over $120M in follow-on investment for winners.

What we cover:

• Why a prize vs grants, funds, or donor-advised vehicles
• The unique gap that philanthropic capital can address
• How CSP structures the prizes to unlock follow-on investment
• Why climate makes up just <2% of climate philanthropy - and how that can change
• Family offices and the next-generation of climate capital
• Communication impact returns - not just financial ones
• What blended finance actually looks like in practice
• Building the "Davos for climate"

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We know heat pumps work - they’ve been around for decades - but actually getting them into homes is a challenge. The gap is structural: high upfront costs, a buying process stuck in the 90s, and a supply chain stacking layers of margin between the manufacturer and your home.

We talk with Stephen Lake, founder and CEO of Jetson, a home electrification company focused on making the transition to electric systems more affordable and sustainable. Jetson was started by the same team that built and sold North (formerly Thalmic Labs) to Google. They raised a $50M Series A earlier this year and are operating in Vancouver, Colorado and Massachusetts.

Jetson is giving heat pumps the DTC treatment and vertically integrating the entire experience - from hardware to install -building a system that functions more like mass production than a typical HVAC company.

What we cover:

• Why home heating is a bigger emissions lever than switching to an EV
• The structural barriers keeping heat pump adoption low - and Jetson’s thesis for closing the gap
• Jetson’s strategy for turning one-off installations into a repeatable process
• How Jetson thinks about entering new markets- The cold-climate and cost myths that are still slowing adoption
• What a fleet of connected homes means for the customer experience
• The grid integration play: demand response, time-of-use optimization, and what comes next

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Can Toronto become a global climate hub - and put Canada on the map?

Becky Park-Romanovsky is a global leader in sustainability and climate action, with a track record of launching and scaling climate-focused initiatives across multiple continents. She founded Toronto Climate Week, co-founded Climate North, is a lecturer on Social Entrepreneurship at IE University in Madrid, and previously developed carbon offset projects across the Americas, Africa, Middle East, and Eastern Europe.

TOCW is a decentralized platform - part convener, part infrastructure layer for Canada's climate ecosystem. Their October kickoff was planned as a single day with 20 events. Instead, it drew 100 events, 5,000 attendees, and representation from 30 countries - with zero international outreach. The full week runs June 1–7 with 200+ events across 16 tracks.

We get into:

• Toronto's potential as a climate hub - where it's strong and who still needs to come to the table
• Why corporate climate action isn't slowing down even as public commitments disappear
• The strategy behind radical inclusion - arts, sports, culture
• Building the infrastructure to turn a week of conversations into measurable outcomes
• What Canada's climate ecosystem looks like if Toronto gets this right

We're happy to be supporting TOCW in their inaugural year as a media partner.

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