Phil De Luna has left his role as the chief science and commercial officer of Montréal-based carbon-capture startup Deep Sky, the executive announced in a LinkedIn post this morning.
In his post, De Luna said he came to Deep Sky to learn how to build a company, and that he’s grown as a leader and a builder.
De Luna only told BetaKit that he is “going to be doing a lot of exploring.”
“I’ve reached a point where I’m ready to take on a new challenge. I’ve outgrown my current role, and it’s time to stretch again—to build something new I own, from the ground up,” De Luna wrote, adding that he wants to keep building solutions to reverse climate change.
“I still believe in the team that I helped build. I have every confidence that Deep Sky will deliver,” De Luna said.
The post drew comments of support from Deep Sky vice-presidents Charlie Renzoni, Quentin Servais Laval, and Jason Vanderheyden. BetaKit has asked Deep Sky for comment but hasn’t received a response as of this writing.
De Luna declined to comment on the nature of his departure or what his next steps are to BetaKit, but did say he is “going to be doing a lot of exploring.”
After meeting Deep Sky co-founders Fred Lalonde and Joost Ouwerkerk, who previously founded Hopper, just over two years ago, De Luna joined Deep Sky as its chief carbon scientist and head of engineering. De Luna brought a Ph.D in materials science and engineering, and experience as a director at the National Research Council of Canada studying carbon capture.
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De Luna shifted to chief science and commercial officer at the beginning of this year, where he helped the company secure deals with Microsoft and RBC. He also claimed in his LinkedIn profile to have built a $300-million sales pipeline for the startup.
De Luna represented Deep Sky at the BetaKit Town Hall: Most Ambitious event just a few weeks ago, where he said that about 10 billion tons of CO2 need to be removed from the atmosphere per year by 2050 in order to reverse climate change. Deep Sky claims it will remove up to 30,000 tons of CO2 from the air over the first ten years of its operations.
“We want to make Canada the place where carbon capture scales,” De Luna said at the gathering.
However, signs point to De Luna looking to other avenues to continue his work on climate. Last week, he penned a piece in Forbes that didn’t mention carbon capture at all, analyzing a study from Dalhousie University that suggested personality traits can influence whether a person believes in climate change. In the piece, De Luna argued that artificial intelligence’s ability to analyze social media behaviour could help design systems and messages that “meet people where they are” to help them care about the impacts of climate change.
De Luna’s departure is the second C-suite shift at the company in recent months. In May, then-CEO Damien Steel left his post, citing personal reasons, transitioning leadership responsibilities to COO Alex Petre ahead of the launch of its Innisfail, Alta. carbon capture site known as Deep Sky Alpha. When Deep Sky announced the site last August, the company said the facility would be operational this past winter. However, that date was revised to spring 2025 when Deep Sky announced $40 million USD in new private grant funding in December. The facility is now on track to open in September 2025, according to the company website.
Feature image courtesy Jon Fingas for BetaKit.