The Women in Cleantech Challenge finalists speak about their experiences completing the first year of the challenge: developing their technologies, growing as entrepreneurs, and the importance of this competition.
November 7, 2019
Read MoreTell us about the best news you received this quarter about your business. Our fundraising round is now officially closed! We also welcomed three interns, and all of them have been great employees. What has been your biggest challenge these last few months? Probably commissioning our new pilot facility. Nonetheless, this experience has presented a […]
October 3, 2019
Read MoreWhat’s the best news you received this quarter about your business? A lot of great things happened for Dispersa that have helped us grow as a company. For one, we’ve moved into a new company lab space located at Centre Québécois d’Innovation en Biotechnologie (CQIB) in Laval. By being a CQIB-supported startup, we’re part of […]
September 26, 2019
Read MoreI’ve often felt pulled in opposite directions. When finishing high school, I felt torn between studying music and engineering; and when planning where I would settle down, I fought between living in the bustle of downtown Toronto and disappearing into the spindly wilderness of northern Ontario. These are easy examples. In my work, this habit […]
September 19, 2019
Read MoreWhat’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 […]
September 12, 2019
Read MoreTell 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 […]
September 5, 2019
Read MoreTell 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 […]
August 29, 2019
Read MoreWhat 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 […]
June 4, 2019
Read MoreMay 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 […]
June 3, 2019
Read MoreHave 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, […]
May 28, 2019
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