Chris Cassin believes there’s no better place to start a deep-tech company than Edmonton, Alberta. Having spent the past five years building a cryogenics company here, he would know.
Cassin is the co-founder and CEO of Zero Point Cryogenics (ZPC), one of just six companies worldwide that commercially manufacture the dilution refrigerators used in quantum research. The machinery ZPC builds uses a complex process of evaporative cooling of Helium-3 to reach temperatures just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero.
“One day, we’re going to get to a point where we have data centres with quantum technologies and AI working together, and we don’t have room for room-sized objects.”
With quantum technology poised to revolutionize fields as broad as pharmaceutical development, supply chain management, financial fraud, risk assessment, and academic research into the very fabric of the universe, the race to develop it is intense. US consulting firm McKinsey estimates the value of quantum technology could reach the $198 billion mark by 2040. In Canada, AI Minister Evan Solomon announced in December the Canadian Quantum Champions Program, intent on funding Canadian anchor companies in the field.
Though it may be a quieter race than the boom surrounding AI, tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are all funnelling enormous amounts of money into the effort. That money would be for naught without the cryogenic tech ZPC and its competitors are building to enable quantum research in the first place. To operate in a quantum state, qubits—the zeros and ones that quantum data is encoded through—hang in a delicate balance. Any small shift in energy (even, say, the slight heat given off by the air) can push them out of whack, creating computing errors, so most quantum computers require extreme cold to operate. That’s where ZPC and its Edmonton lab come in.
“We’ve travelled to many of those other quantum ecosystems globally, and they just don’t have the perfect Venn diagram of a university with a world-renowned, low-temperature physics lab, the welders, machinists, and technically skilled individuals that come out of the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) and other polytechnics,…and the low cost of lease spaces,” Cassin said.
From academia to startup
Initially incorporated in 2017 as an academic exercise, ZPC is the brainchild of Dr. John P. Davis, a professor and low-temperature physicist at the University of Alberta and ZPC’s CTO. In his research at the university’s aptly named Davis Lab, he spent years working with dilution refrigerators.
“He had the foresight to say ‘quantum computing is coming, these are the tools that enable quantum computing, sensing and communication—and they weren’t to his standards,’” said Elise Usunier, ZPC’s chief commercialization officer.
Usunier said Davis’s frustration with the status quo—its complicated interface, expensive leaks (Helium-3, the gas used in dilution refrigerators, can cost in to the tens of millions per kilogram), and room-filling size—inspired the academic to strike out into the entrepreneurial space. His goal was to build something more reliable, compact, and intuitive than the systems he had worked with in the past.
“One day, we’re going to get to a point where we have data centres with quantum technologies and AI working together, and we don’t have room for room-sized objects,” Usuneir said.
Commercializing cryo
Fast forward to 2026, and Davis’s vision is now a 6,300-square-foot deep-tech manufacturing facility nestled into a featureless southside Edmonton business park that it shares with a mixed-martial arts studio, a flooring company, and a children’s NERF gun arena.
Cassin, who prior to his foray into quantum cryogenics ran Fox Oilfield Inc., a trucking company out of Nisku, Alta., came aboard as CEO in 2021 to help merge the technical side of cryogenics with the commercial needs of a startup.
ZPC hired its first staff member in 2022 and shipped its first dilution refrigerator to the National Research Council of Canada (NRCC) in 2023.
“That delivery was really what enabled us to build a reputation and prove to the market that ‘yes, we can do this,’” Usunier said.
Since then, the company has grown to 40 people. The dilution refrigerators it manufactures are smaller and more modular than the cryogenic systems of yesteryear—less the size of a room than of a kitchen refrigerator. In 2025, ZPC shipped four units globally. This year, it expects to ship about twelve.
Cassin expects the company to grow to more than 80 people over the next 12 to 18 months, but even at that number, it is still smaller than many of its competitors; companies like Finland’s Bluefors and the UK’s Oxford Instruments boast hundreds of staff.
To date, venture capital cash injections for the startup have been limited. The company won second place at Startup TNT in 2022, taking home $110,000. Otherwise, capital for cryogenics’ costly overhead has been expensed mostly to the bank of Chris and John, with support from organizations like PrairiesCan, Alberta Innovates, and SR&ED.
It’s an impressive feat to see that much organic growth without widespread external investment, and it has Cassin once again singing the praises of Alberta as a strategic location for ZPC.
“It’s called the Alberta advantage for a reason,” he said. “When you look at how much it costs to manufacture in the US, the UK, or the Netherlands, and then you look at our costs of manufacturing, they’re extremely low compared to our competitors.”
Closed-loop security
There’s an old saying that if you’re the smartest person in a room, you’re in the wrong room. There’s little chance of being in the wrong room at ZPC—even their marketing coordinator, Sophie Gans, is a physicist.
And while all that brain power is no doubt a net benefit, it’s not just researchers and academics fuelling ZPC. The company boasts its own in-house machine shop and production facility. The shop, filled with lathes, mills, and welding equipment, would not be out of place in an oil-and-gas operation, save for the stacks of gleaming, gold- and copper-plated dilution refrigerator components huddled nearby.
“It’s called the Alberta advantage for a reason.”
Those skilled tradespeople, many of whom trace their career origins back to Alberta’s energy sector, are a defining aspect of what Cassin and Usunier say makes ZPC uniquely attractive to security-focused customers: a closed-loop manufacturing cycle.
“We do all of our own machining, welding, and polishing…we’re able to assure quality on every single component. We’re not outsourcing,” Usunier said.
That matters more than one might think. ZPC’s clientele is largely global, comprising research institutes, private businesses, and government bodies.
In recent months, amid a flurry of concern over national sovereignty and ongoing tension between Canada and the US, ZPC has seen increased interest from Canada’s defense sector, including contracts for two dilution refrigerators for Defense Research and Development Canada, Usunier said.
“From an [intellectual property] perspective, keeping everything in house ensures our customers’ designs or use cases aren’t at foreign risk,” she said.
The future is now
Cassin’s predictions of growth at ZPC aren’t just happy speculation. The company is eyeing a potential move to a much larger manufacturing facility on Edmonton’s south side, though Cassin wasn’t able to confirm whether a lease had been signed when BetaKit spoke with him in late January.
The company is also beginning to court outside investment. ZPC recently began its first fundraising round, which Cassin is confident will help fuel expansion internally and in the field of quantum development writ large.
“We really see this industry as nascent. Every system we sell is advancing the state of quantum. We really see ourselves as a partner in that [research and development],” he said.
BetaKit’s Prairies reporting is funded in part by YEGAF, a not-for-profit dedicated to amplifying business stories in Alberta.
Feature image courtesy Zero Point Cryogencis.