Crossing the FOAK chasm

Hard-won lessons on commercializing climate hardtech and what it takes to put together bankable projects.

Author

Justin Reist
November 25, 2025

We’re back from Converge in Vancouver this week, hosted by our friends at NorthX. Conversations centred on one of the toughest challenges in climate tech: getting from the lab to a commercial-scale, financeable project. We heard from founders, operators, and investors who’ve lived the FOAK grind and shared their hard-won lessons on bringing climate hardtech to market.

In today’s issue, we dig into all things FOAK, and why bankability, not technology, is often the make-or-break factor. We’ve also got:

  • Partage Club lands $2.7M to build the “Shopify of sharing”

  • CO280 hits a carbon capture milestone

  • And COP30 closes without a plan for fossil fuels

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INSIGHTS

Converge 2025: Turning hardtech pilots into bankable projects

Source: NorthX

Scaling climate hardtech isn’t just about technical problem solving. It means building the business engine behind the invention, and putting together projects that can turn risky, first-of-a-kind (FOAK) projects into financeable, repeatable commercial assets.

At Converge, hosted by NorthX, founders, investors and industry partners explored how we build climate hardtech and shared hard-won lessons from building FOAK projects.

Why it matters: Building the FOAK project is a key step to commercialization. David Yeh of Precursor, a specialist FOAK developer, says the goal for founders is to show how the first project is a precursor to your molecule or electron being the next big thing - creating trillion dollar companies and decarbonizing entire sectors.

Founders often think that the technical risks in a FOAK project are the hardest. But as multiple founders shared on stage, risks around bankability, project development, and business model design are just as critical. A great technology won’t scale unless the first project is structured so that a banker can look at it and say: “uh huh, got it.”

However, these first projects often struggle, looking more like tech R&D experiments instead of financeable projects. The result: stalled projects, lost momentum, and investors questioning whether the market is ready.

Crossing the FOAK chasm: Teams that successfully cross the FOAK chasm bake have a few things in common:

  • Baking in commercialization from day one by adding team members with business skills and getting early customer input

  • Thoughtfully structuring projects for bankability at every step, with clear offtake agreements, joint-venture structures, and repeatable economic models

  • Adding people who have built real projects before, and have seen all the weird ways they can go wrong

State of play: Canadian founders are putting the pieces together across the country.

  • CO280 is setting up joint-ventures with pulp and paper companies and securing offtake agreements with corporate buyers like JPMorgan Chase.

  • Mangrove Lithium is building its first full-scale lithium production plant in BC (with offtakes in place), and is already making plans for a larger, second plant in Ontario.

NorthX announced a $1.5M follow-on investment in Mangrove Lithium at Converge, and $500K in seed investments for five new ventures coming out of BC universities.

The bottom line: Scaling up is a daunting challenge and requires thoughtful team and project design in addition to building a capital stack around project. Done well, first-of-a-kind projects have the potential to unlock industry-transforming climate solutions. As Yeh said, Canada has a great home court - now we have to own it.

💬 My takeaways

A big thanks to the NorthX team for inviting me out for Converge. A few personal takeaways from the day:

Know your customer. Solve the pressing problem, not the “interesting” one. And get to know the details, including the org chart, who makes decisions, and the specific mine or plant where your technology could work.

Dual-use opportunities. Climate companies can leverage defence spending and ITBs to meet national security needs and advance low-carbon solutions. Founders should be thinking about how climate fits into the national interest.

Stop punishing failure. The U.S. DOE’s risk tolerance helped birth the EV sector via Tesla, but punishing failure in Solyndra set their solar ambitions back by decades. Canada needs to seek out what’s learned through failure instead of punishing what didn’t work.

Waste-to-value. Several founders spoke to the impact that a waste-to-value strategy can have, helping customers unlock more value in their operations while making an impact on emissions. In many cases, this lens helped identify new co-benefits that otherwise would have been overlooked.

CLIMATE CAPITAL

🤝 Partage Club (Montreal, QC) raised a $2.7 million seed round for its peer-to-peer sharing platform, aiming to become the “Shopify of sharing”.

🔋 Moment Energy (Coquitlam, BC) received a $5 million investment from TD Innovation Partners to accelerate its repurposed EV battery storage solutions.

🚗 Enedym (Hamilton, ON) secured a strategic investment from Honda Xcelerator Ventures for its next-gen electric motors and powertrains.

🏢 SOFIAC (Montreal, QC) is raising a second fund to invest in energy-saving and decarbonization retrofits for industrial buildings.

IN THE FIELD

☀️ Powertrust closed a deal with Microsoft to deploy 270 MW of new distributed solar energy across Mexico and Brazil.

♻️ Anaergia will build a $43M waste-to-energy facility at a California water purification plant.

🏭️ CO280 successfully completed a carbon capture field test at a US pulp and paper mill with SLB Capturi, hitting a 95% capture rate.

🔋 NEO Battery Materials is partnering with Nascent Materials to co-develop high-performance lithium-ion batteries for defence and AI energy storage.

🪨 Norway’s Vianode will build a $3.2B synthetic graphite plant in Ontario, backed by a $650M provincial loan, and tapping into industrial infrastructure around Volkswagen’s PowerCo plant.

🔋 Microgrid company Hybrid Power Solutions partnered with CarboMat to develop low-cost, sustainable anode materials for Hybrid’s lithium-ion batteries.

🔌 Polestar partnered with Montreal’s dcbel to launch a vehicle-to-home charging solution in California, its first step to offering bi-directional charging.

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NEWS

📡 Signals & Currents

Negotiators at COP30 managed to produce a deal, but the text is missing any wording around an actual plan for transitioning off of fossil fuels.

Notable progress are a "Global Implementation Accelerator" and "Belém Mission to 1.5” to help countries meet their Paris emissions pledges, and a commitment to 3x adaptation finance.

💬 Why it matters: The gap on fossil fuel transition plans highlights the limits of a consensus-based model of climate talks. The important work will increasingly get done in other venues, like Climate Weeks and international summits, where single parties can’t hold up consensus decision-making and aligned blocs can work together.

Canada signed a new internal trade agreement, streamlining the sale of goods across provinces & territories, opening up new domestic markets.

International investors have “continued very high interest” in exploring more opportunities in Canada following Carney’s trade visit to Sweden.

Alberta and the feds agreed on the broad outlines of an energy deal that would trade progress on pipelines for carbon capture and stronger carbon pricing.

Canada’s grid is significantly less at risk of energy shortfalls than the US according to NERC.

BC scrapped its EV rebates and sales mandate - planning to align with upcoming national targets.

Ontario is advancing a new geologic carbon storage bill, providing a critical policy framework to sequester emissions.

A 1200MW transmission line from Quebec to Maine is finally coming online, while a high-voltage line from Canada to Europe secured its first investors.

Quick hits:

COMMUNITY

🗓️ MaRS Climate Impact: MaRS Climate Impact brings together the world’s foremost tech and finance leaders to speed up the adoption of climate solutions. Toronto, Dec 2-3rd.

🗓️ Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal in Canada Forum: Bringing together researchers, industry, government, community organizations and more to advanced the mCDR sector in Canada. Halifax, Dec 2 - 3rd.

🧑🏻‍💻 Lite-1 is hiring a Fermentation and Upstream Process Development Scientist to help scale up their fermentation processes from lab-scale to commercial production.

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