The Climate Cycle

This episode is part of a larger project exploring Indigenous partnerships for climate tech startups with Climate Door. More to come soon.Chad Rickaby is the CEO and co-founder of ClimateDoor. Through it’s Unify Partners practice, Chad has spent years helping put together meaningful partnerships between climate tech companies and Indigenous entrepreneurs and Nations.Many climate tech founders know there's an opportunity to work with Indigenous communities - as project partners, technology co-developers, or as adopters and buyers. But few know where to begin - and are afraid to get it wrong.As a result, companies pursue other markets and partners, or burn trust before projects start. In this episode, Chad shares his perspective on what it takes for companies to build meaningful partnerships, the failure modes that keep showing up, and why co-developing technology deserves more attention than it gets.MOREShow notes:Subscribe to our weekly newsletter: https://climatetechcanada.ca/subscribeLike the episode? Leave a review - it helps us reach more peopleFeedback and guest suggestions hello [ at ] climatetechcanada.ca

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 POINTSWhy CRWN.ai pivoted out of a defence-tech sister company and back into grid resilienceHow wildfire liability, EV load, and data centre demand are colliding on utility boards' risk radar right nowWhat it actually takes to get a risk-averse utility to put their hardware on live infrastructureWhy the funding model that works for defence doesn't exist yet for Canadian climate techHow CRWN.ai incorporates Indigenous knowledge into wildfire-risk modelling, and where it's outperforming Western dataWhat 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 capitalHow SAIL's convertible-debt structure realigns incentives for founders, universities, and investorsThe case for venture philanthropy — and what the UK's already figured outWhy targeting a 98% failure rate can be sound policy, not a red flag Why tracking inputs instead of outcomes is holding Canadian innovation policy backWhat has to change first — and who has to move — to stop losing IP abroadMOREShow notes & links: https://climatetechcanada.ca/p/podcast-lab-to-market-kyle-briggsSubscribe to our weekly newsletter⁠⁠⁠ for Canadian climate tech funding, news, and trends: https://climatetechcanada.ca/subscribeEnjoying the show? Leave a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts!Feedback or guest ideas: hello @ climatetechcanada.ca

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 headlinesThe shift from voluntary pledges to regulation-driven demandWhat the EU's CSRD actually requires and how Canadian companies get pulled in from the outsideWhy asset owners and pension funds haven't changed course, even as public pledges disappearWhat "audit-ready" data really means, and how ESG reporting is maturing the way financial reporting once didBuilding a global enterprise company from Montreal, and why AI raises the stakes on owning trusted dataMORESubscribe to our weekly newsletter⁠⁠⁠ for Canadian climate tech funding, news, and trends: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://climatetechcanada.ca/subscribe⁠⁠⁠⁠Enjoying the show? Leave a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts!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 decadesThe coordination problem: why this is a governance gap, not a technology gapLocal Energy's two tools: "Builder" to design a network, "Operator" to run itModelling 32 million project parameters instead of using spreadsheetsHow Canada compares to Denmark and Germany, and what policy shift would close the gapThe path from a handful of Canadian sites to ten thousandMORESubscribe to our weekly newsletter⁠⁠⁠ for Canadian climate tech funding, news, and trends: ⁠⁠https://climatetechcanada.ca/subscribe⁠⁠Enjoying the show? Leave a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts!Feedback or guest ideas: hello @ climatetechcanada.ca