Program from MaRS and RBC looks to support woman-identifying or non-binary founders of Canadian cleantech startups.
Toronto tech hub MaRS announced the 10 entrepreneurs participating in the latest cohort of the RBC Women in Cleantech Accelerator this week.
The new cohort includes the founders of Xatoms, Permalution, SkyAcres Agrotechnologies, Synoro Medical Technologies, TerraFixing, CERT Systems, Seedark, ALT-PRO Advantage, Seacork Studio, and Viridis Research.
“To respond to the complex issues of climate change and biodiversity loss, we need innovative solutions and diversity of thought and perspective.”
Thea Silver
RBC
The program looks to support woman-identifying or non-binary founders of a Canadian business working to commercialize a cleantech innovation. MaRS and RBC teamed up to launch the accelerator as a 12-month program in 2021, but switched to a two-year program with its second cohort in 2022.
The two-year program aims to provide women founders with tools and mentorship to help scale their cleantech startups in what reports claim is still a male-dominated sector. The accelerator provides participants with access to investor and mentor networks, opportunities to work with a federal government research and development lab, and a business advisor with sector-specific knowledge.
“To respond to the complex issues of climate change and biodiversity loss, we need innovative solutions and diversity of thought and perspective,” RBC senior director of environmental impact Thea Silver said in a statement.
Cohort member Diana Virgovicova, founder of Xatoms, is coming off a prize-filled year. The startup looks to improve access to clean water with quantum chemistry and artificial intelligence (AI). Xatoms recently took home $250,000 and three prizes, including the Best of the Fest prize, the Women in Tech investment prize, and the Front Row Ventures student entrepreneur prize, at this year’s Startupfest. The startup aims to eventually sell a purification filter for consumers and a water treatment powder for commercial use as early as 2025, Virgovicova told BetaKit earlier this year.
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Permalution founder and CEO Tatiana Estevez is also looking to improve access to clean water in a different way. Permalution harvests water from fog and clouds, claiming its devices can collect up to three times more water than rain. Permalution won the $100,000 prize for The Firehood’s Women in Tech award at Startupfest in 2022 and joined the Women+ Entrepreneur Incubator in 2023.
Zaffia Laplante, co-founder and CEO of Surrey, British Columbia-based SkyAcres, will also be participating in this year’s cohort. The agtech startup offers an indoor farming software and marketplace aimed at users with underutilized residential and commercial space that can be used to grow and sell produce. SkyAcres was one of three Canadian tech startups tapped to join the 2024 cohort of Google’s Women Founders accelerator program earlier this year.
More information about the founders in this year’s cohort can be found on MaRS’s website.
Feature image courtesy Diana Virgovicova via LinkedIn.