News

What’s the best news you received this past quarter about your business? Winning $100,000 in the Impact Investor Challenge! We were one of the five finalist companies selected out of more than 100 to participate in a 10-week impact investing competition hosted by Spring Activator in Vancouver. After a final pitch in front of a […]

Tell us about the best news you received about your business these last few months? Thanks to some help from NRCan, we were able to hire our first employee! He’s a new mechatronics engineering graduate. He’ll be focusing on scaling and further automating our nanomaterial manufacturing process under the supervision of NRCan expertise. He’ll also […]

Tell us the best news you received this past quarter about your business. This has been my most exciting quarter yet. My team and I reached some very important milestones with our prototype, we took second place in the Energy New Venture Competition, and we were shortlisted for the National Angel Capital Organization’s (NACO) Most […]

What technology challenges have you faced over the past few months and what steps have you taken to overcome them? The biggest challenges were in validating the most suitable type of bioreactors to use for making our PHAs — and hitting consistently higher yields. We’ve overcome them by pursuing continuous reiterations of our experimentation and […]

May was an unusually busy time for the Women In Cleantech cohort. Earlier in the month, our six finalists attended the Industry Growth Forum, an annual gathering in Denver hosted by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a close partner to MaRS. Considered one of the better networking events in North America for cleantech, the […]

Have you read any interesting books or literature lately to help you on your entrepreneurial journey? I’m currently reading The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy, by Mervin King. I’ve often struggled to learn finance, but King lays out the history of how the financial sector developed over time, […]

What technology challenges have you faced over the past few months and what steps have you taken to overcome them? A big focus for us has been developing the communication systems and live-stream video feed for our autonomous boats. Our solar-powered boats can travel both in coastal waters and far offshore, which means that, at […]

How do you enjoy juggling business operations (IP, hiring, governance, etc.) with technology development? It’s been an incredibly enriching experience to be involved in every aspect of the business thus far. Having started my company about six months ago, it’s been an exciting period of self-growth in terms of acquiring business and financial knowledge. Being […]

How do you like juggling the business side of entrepreneurship (IP, hiring, governance, etc.) with technology development? Throughout my career, I’ve had the opportunity to build experience on both sides. As an entrepreneur, I think it’s important to strike the right balance between these two different but connected areas. It’s hard to do it all, […]

What technology challenges have you faced over the past few months and what steps have you taken to overcome them? We’ve had no technical challenges to overcome so far, but it is still early days. We did a lot of homework interviewing experts around the world before we began, that way we could design around […]