The Climate Cycle

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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Subscribe to our weekly newsletter⁠⁠⁠ for Canadian climate tech funding, news, and trends: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://climatetechcanada.ca/subscribe⁠⁠⁠⁠
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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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Subscribe to our weekly newsletter⁠⁠⁠ for Canadian climate tech funding, news, and trends: ⁠⁠https://climatetechcanada.ca/subscribe⁠⁠
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Feedback or guest ideas: hello @ climatetechcanada.ca

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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Subscribe to our weekly newsletter⁠⁠⁠ for Canadian climate tech funding, news, and trends: ⁠https://climatetechcanada.ca/subscribe⁠
Enjoying the show? Leave a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts!
Feedback or guest ideas: hello @ climatetechcanada.ca