Identifying Canada’s 50 most investable cleantech companies

The Foresight 50 event was launched to address one of the biggest challenges facing Canadian cleantech innovators—securing the investment they need to commercialize, scale and launch green economy solutions. Canadian cleantech accelerator, Foresight Canada, conceived the event as a way to showcase some of Canada’s clean economy talent and to attract investment where it’s most and desperately needed. Drawn from an open call for nominations and judged by an independent jury, the event highlights 50 of the most investable Canadian cleantech companies. That makes the Foresight 50 a capital idea.

 

When a 2021 national survey of Canadian cleantech companies conducted by Foresight, revealed that access to capital is the number one barrier to success identified by green tech ventures, the Canadian cleantech accelerator launched a plan to help bridge that gap. That plan, the Foresight 50 event, was designed as a way to showcase Canada’s cleantech innovators. The goal was to attract the capital and investments these ventures need if they are to launch, scale, and commercialize their technologies the way they hope to, and the planet needs them to.

Whether it’s Canadian companies that have solutions ready to be deployed, or companies that are already making an impact and supporting Canada’s net zero goals, it was clear to Foresight that more investment is key if these innovations are to achieve their full potential.

Exposure being the name of the game, the announcement of the Foresight 50 call for nominations was supported by an integrated marketing campaign. Creative messaging, high-impact, eye-catching graphics, and posts helped compel Foresight’s audience to take part in the nomination process. All while also building awareness for the event in the cleantech ecosystem. In total, Foresight saw an online reach of 17,800 and with more than 1,100 comments, shares, and likes. This high level of engagement resulted in nearly 200 nominations of ventures from all across Canada. From there, a judging panel, which included leading cleantech investors and industry leaders, selected the top 50 ventures.

The Foresight 50 event itself was well-attended, with close to 200 people, including prominent investors, industry partners, and cleantech innovators from across the world. Event registrations included 80 investors/corporate partners. Audience engagement for the showcase was strong, including 365 interactions at the virtual booths hosted by Foresight 50 companies. Among the most popular booths were Flash Forest, Graphite Innovation and Technologies, and Solaires Enterprises. In a survey of the Foresight 50 that followed the event, 69% of respondents indicated that it was likely or very likely that they would see a commercial outcome (capital or grants obtained, pilot, customer) as a result of being part of the Foresight 50.

100% of the respondents said they benefited from taking part in the event in other ways, including higher engagement on social media, positive feedback from partners and customers, increased credibility, or market awareness. Importantly, several Foresight 50 companies went on to have successful raises after the event, including 2S Water, which was successful in SDTC’s seed funding round in December 2021 and raised $150,000 in grant funding

Planetary Technologies won the Carbon XPRIZE in early 2022, securing a $1M investment and Ekona Power announced its close of a CAD $79M equity investment in February 2022. HTEC received a $5M investment from the regional development agency Pacific Economic Development Agency of Canada in May 2022.

That’s a good, green return.