The World Savers

BetaKit Most Ambitious

Purifying the Earth’s water

Xatoms (Toronto, ON)

Diana Virgovicova’s life changed at a river’s edge.

On a trip to India at the age of 14, she saw girls in a village near Mumbai washing in polluted water that would surely make them sick.

Clean water is a basic human need, but only 25 percent of the global population has safe access to it, according to the World Health Organization. The UN estimates that waterborne diseases result in 2.2 million deaths each year.

Witnessing the danger faced by girls who were about her own age, Virgovicova saw the potential to avert tragedy through design.

“I decided at that time that I wanted to dedicate my life to solving this problem,” she told BetaKit.

Returning to her home country of Slovakia, Virgovicova dove into the study of quantum chemistry, which uses AI and the principles of quantum mechanics to understand chemical behaviour at the molecular level.

Today, she leads Xatoms, a Toronto-based company developing materials to clean polluted water around the world.

Xatoms uses AI and quantum chemistry to identify new photocatalysts: molecular compounds that can purify water with sunlight.

Virgovicova describes the process this way: Xatoms’ “materials discovery engine” mines thousands of research papers to isolate key chemical structures, identify photocatalysts that work under visible light, and use quantum chemistry to design new, pollution-fighting materials.

The technological combo lets Xatoms simulate, test, and rank potential molecules before they’re synthesized in a lab, rapidly accelerating the discovery process.

It also unlocks the potential to solve immense global challenges, faster than anyone could imagine.

“We are at the beginning of the quantum revolution,” Virgovicova said. “We know its potential.”

The company’s first photocatalyst can break down organic pollutants like bacteria, herbicides, and pesticides. It doesn’t need heat, electricity, or complex filter systems, which are the common failure points in existing methods.

After Xatoms synthesizes small batches of photocatalyst in powder form in its lab, it integrates the materials into products, such as filters, pipes, and mesh systems for use in water treatment, drinking water filtration, and river remediation. The startup has developed eight photocatalysts so far, all of which are patent-pending.

But the vision goes beyond individual discoveries. Xatoms wants to develop a platform that can help discover new materials to solve the global water crisis on an ongoing basis, responding to new forms of pollution and use cases as they emerge.

Virgovicova created her first working model of a visible-light photocatalyst when she was just 17, while studying chemistry and mathematics in the United Kingdom.

In 2020, she came to Canada on the prestigious Lester B. Pearson International Scholarship, and began studying computer engineering at the University of Toronto.

From her new home, Virgovicova participated in a Cansbridge Fellowship, which offers motivated young Canadians a self-organized summer internship in Asia, exposing them to new markets and new opportunities.

It was in this program that she met Xatoms co-founders Shirley Zhong and Kerem Topalismailoglu. The trio shared a background in software and were united by a shared frustration: materials science wasn’t moving fast enough.

Together, the Xatoms founders have moved quickly to make their mark in the lab and across the globe. As a delegate to the G20 Young Entrepreneurs’ Alliance, Virgovicova contributed to a joint statement to the UN General Assembly on the global water crisis. It introduced them to a powerful global network including Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and his 776 Foundation’s fellowship program, as well as Water.org co-founder Matt Damon.

With R&D support from Amazon Web Services and UNESCO, Xatoms has worked on clean water access initiatives in Nigeria and similar regions, where conventional treatment methods often fall short.

But Virgovicova’s vision extends beyond her impact on individual water sources. United Nations data shows that women and girls bear much of the global responsibility for fetching water, a gendered responsibility that can exclude them from education and employment.

The search for clean water denies women and girls a full role in society, choking progress and limiting their ability to create their own solutions to local and global challenges.

The problem Virgovicova decided to solve at the age of 14 was not about the Mumbai river water, it was about the girls them- selves. She sees the technology her company is building as a tool against gender inequality.

“Water pollution is connected to the education of women,” she said. “If we cannot educate women, then the gender gap is going to get wider.”

Clean fusion energy

General Fusion (Richmond, BC)

Fusion is often referred to as the holy grail of clean energy. It’s carbon-free, meltdown-proof, and theoretically infinite.

However, replicating the power of the sun on Earth means heating hydrogen to more than 100 million degrees and keeping it stable long enough to harvest the energy. That challenge has made working fusion reactors little more than a tantalizing possibility.

But General Fusion believes it can make fusion energy available within a decade.

To make one of science’s most elusive breakthroughs a reality, founder Dr. Michel Laberge chose a process known as magnetized target fusion. MTF involves upgrading existing technology to squeeze plasma (the extremely hot, electrically charged gas needed for fusion) until it fuses and releases energy.

In just 16 months, General Fusion was able to build its LM26 machine, which has already formed the magnetized plasmas needed for fusion at the lifetimes required to begin a large-scale plasma compression program.

Many important steps remain. The big one? Continue to raise enough capital to prove that fusion can serve as a net energy source.

If General Fusion can succeed, the future of energy won’t just be clean and abundant. It will be Canadian.

Turning up the electric heat

Jetson (Vancouver, BC)

Stephen Lake wants to do for electric home heating what Tesla did for electric cars: make it ubiquitous.

His Vancouver-based startup, Jetson, is reimagining residential heat pump installation—a crucial but clunky part of transitioning homes to electric heating.

Energy used for heating homes and commercial buildings accounts for 16 percent of all energy use in Canada, and 13 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. In Canada, a typical home emits as much carbon each year as a gas-powered car.

Heat pumps are the low-emissions solution, but adoption is stalled by high upfront installation costs—as much as $20,000—and confusing permitting that leaves homeowners overwhelmed.

Jetson wants to eliminate the friction. The company handles financing, permitting, and installation through one seamless, software-powered platform that automates as many steps as possible. The vertical integration cuts upfront costs to as little as $2,000 and slashes installation times.

If you recognize Lake’s name, that’s because he’s a repeat founder who sold his smart glasses company, North (formerly Thalmic Labs), to Google in 2020.

Lake is now running a “dramatically different” business, but one he says can “make a big dent in climate change” by electrifying the 100 million homes across North America currently burning fossil fuels.

Plastic-free packaged goods

Erthos (Toronto, ON)

Our society’s growing demand for plastic is more than a pollution problem, it’s a public health problem.

The average human brain is now 0.5 percent plastic by weight, according to global studies, with tiny shards of microplastics also found in lungs, reproductive organs, blood vessels, and bone marrow. The deadline to reduce global plastic use was yesterday.

Thankfully, a new solution has emerged to remove plastics from the global supply chain. Erthos wants to squash the world’s reliance on plastic by dramatically accelerating the manufacturing sector’s transition to sustainable biomaterials.

Founded by Nuha Siddiqui and Kritika Tyagi in 2018, Erthos uses AI to create and deliver custom-designed, biomaterial-based plastic alternatives to consumer packaged goods and materials companies.

The company’s proprietary materials work, and are cost-competitive with other flexible packaging materials. Erthos’ biomaterials also break down into organic matter when disposed of properly, reducing waste and environmental impact.

The scale of the opportunity is enormous. More than 400 million tons of plastic are produced annually, and biomaterial alternatives currently represent less than one percent of the market.

Erthos is fighting the narrative that sustainable materials are too expensive, too early-stage, or too complex to scale.

“As an industry, we haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s possible,” Siddiqui said.

A network of local economies

Zita Cobb (Fogo Island, NL)

Zita Cobb knows a thing or two about optimizing networks.

Born on Fogo Island, Nfld., she worked in the Alberta oil sector before finding her way to JDS Optics, a fibre optics company founded in Ottawa in 1981.

With Cobb as its CFO, the company merged with Uniphase, relocated to California and provided the bandwidth for the early internet.

Today, Cobb is focused on creating a different kind of bandwidth.

After exercising her JDS Uniphase stock options in 2001 and sailing around the world for four years, she returned to Newfoundland and—with her brothers—built the Fogo Island Inn, a globally famous hotel credited with singlehandedly reviving the island’s local economy.

Last year, Cobb founded The Shorefast Network for Place-Based Economies, intent on scaling a model for local economic recovery.

As the world remains focused on digital layers, Cobb is working to optimize the places people actually live. Shorefast will use technology to map local economies and identify opportunities for jobs and industries—creating the building blocks of “economic nutrition.” The goal is to increase the flow of financial capital to more places across Canada and around the world, keeping small towns viable in a global economy.

“Place holds everything,” Cobb says. “All the answers, all the questions. Nothing is understood until it’s understood in a place.”

The (non) bleeding edge of meat alternatives

New School Foods (Toronto, ON)

Forget plant-based burgers. Have you tried the plant-based salmon that looks, cooks, and tastes like the real thing?

Toronto-based food science startup New School Foods has pioneered a whole-cut salmon alternative made of seaweed, algae, and soy that mimics the texture, flavour, and experience of real salmon—including the same levels of Omega 3.

That’s great news for the climate-related push to change the world’s eating habits, as animal agriculture is responsible for almost 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. But it wasn’t easy.

Fish have a unique, flaky texture created by bundles of microscopic muscle fibres that are impossible to replicate with traditional plant-based methods.

To tackle the challenge, New School Foods developed a new approach that involves proprietary muscle fibre and scaffolding technologies to mimic the flakiness and juiciness of fresh fish.

The plant-based industry also struggles with customer expectations, product quality, and a higher price point.

Founder Chris Bryson understands that encouraging users to abandon animal protein without a delicious alternative is like swimming upstream.

“What’s generally available for consumers now are rubbery, ground, precooked products that will not convince the average customer to change their lifelong habits,” he said.

To help alter those habits, the company has secured funding from IKEA. We might one day see plant-based salmon in the Swedish chain’s food markets.

Sustainable luxury

MycoFutures (Montréal, QC)

“Oh, this bag? It’s mushroom.”

It sounds crazy, but mushroom fashion has arrived, and it’s coming for your leather.

Founded by mushroom farmers Stephanie Lipp and Leo Gillis, biomaterials startup MycoFutures uses mycelium—the root-like structure of a fungus—to create fully biodegradable, leather-alternative products.

The unexpectedly durable and aesthetic alternative is non-toxic and uses less water and energy than traditional leather. As fashion brands actively look to transition to environmentally friendly materials to reduce their carbon footprint, MycoFutures is set to prove that luxury can be sustainable.

Committed to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the startup’s ambitions extend to sustainable production techniques as well. It’s an added level of complexity for a company already dealing with green chemistry research and development, consumer demands, customer supply chains, and manufacturing.

But Lipp says meeting sustainability commitments “is part of the joy” of the challenge. “If you don’t tell the story in the right way, they sound like barriers. My job is to make those seem like opportunities.”

One opportunity was offered to MycoFutures by SRTX founder Katherine Homuth, who provided the company with Montréal factory space and $100,000 in purchase orders to sell the limited-run Myco Travel Pouch on its product site.

The New Industrialists

CERT Systems (Toronto, ON)

Transforming greenhouse gases into industrial chemicals like ethylene without using fossil fuels. The company sequesters more than three tons of carbon dioxide for every tonne of ethylene it produces, with plans to mitigate half a gigatonne of annual emissions.

Jule (Oshawa, ON)

Installing fast-charging EV stations that minimize strain on the electrical grid. Jule’s Level 3+ station can charge an electric vehicle in less than 30 minutes.

Future Fields (Edmonton, AB)

Fruit flies have helped produce Nobel Prize-winning research into Alzheimer’s, autism, and diabetes. Now, a husband and wife team are using the pests to cheaply and sustainably produce recombinant proteins, an essential ingredient in life-saving medical research.

Carbon Upcycling (Calgary, AB)

Creating a valuable resource from industrial carbon emissions, the technology captures CO2 and binds it to industrial byproducts created in coal-burning power plants. The result is an advanced material like concrete, already being deployed at cement plants around the world.

e-Zinc (Mississauga, ON)

Developing the world’s most affordable and reliable long-duration energy storage solution. With zinc as its base metal, e-Zinc’s batteries are cheaper than lithium, can hold energy for multiple days, and perform in temperatures ranging from -30°C to 60°C.

Knead Tech (Calgary, AB)

Connecting food-rescue organizations with large-scale donors, simplifying the logistics of food waste. Deployed at last year’s NFL Draft and the winner of SXSW’s 2025 pitch contest in the AgTech & Food category.

A head in the clouds

Deep Sky (Montréal, QC)

Phil De Luna had been studying carbon removal for years when he met Fred Lalonde and Joost Ouwerkerk, the co-founders of Hopper.

The pair had been looking for a way to offset the carbon impact of their travel platform, and had just founded Deep Sky, a company that planned to remove carbon from the atmosphere, quickly (Laurence Tosi, former CFO of Airbnb, is also a co-founder).

Today, De Luna is Deep Sky’s chief science and commercial officer, tasked with bringing this goal to life.

In less than two years, Deep Sky has opened its first site—Deep Sky Alpha—in Innisfail, AB, with funding from Bill Gates’ climate fund.

BetaKit spoke to De Luna about the company’s goals and his own motivation. This interview has been edited and condensed.

What is Deep Sky trying to do?

We’re an oil and gas company in reverse. Our ambition is to reverse climate change. If you believe the science, which we do, we need about 10 billion tons of CO2 removed from the atmosphere per year by 2050.

Shouldn’t we just stop emitting C02?

Direct capture is not a replacement for emission reduction. We have to wean ourselves off fossil fuels. But there’s always going to be about 10 to 15 percent of the emissions that are impossible to abate.

We’re not gonna stop flying people and goods around the world. We’re not gonna be having a plane that runs on hydrogen because we had zephyrs before and they exploded.

We are also failing horribly at reducing our emissions. And as we continue to fail, the role of removing it from the atmosphere becomes more and more important.

It’s our backstop. It’s our insurance policy. If we don’t start developing this now, we’re not gonna have it when we need it.

There are a lot of Canadian carbon capture companies. What’s going on?

We have enough storage capacity to reverse climate change here in Canada. Every ton of CO2 we’ve emitted since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, we can store here.

Canada is actually the best place in the world to do direct air capture. We have the right geologic storage, we have a lot of clean hydro power, we have an oil and gas sector with a talented workforce and skills that we could use to do the same thing, but in reverse.

And we have really good policies. Canada has the world’s first government-backed Direct Capture Protocol, the world’s first government procurement program, and the world’s first investment tax credit for direct capture.

Canada punches above its weight in terms of science and innovation generally. Some of the first patents in carbon capture technology were here in Canada. We have world-leading universities that have been developing this stuff for a long, long time.

We’re a natural resource-based economy, and oil and gas are a serious part of our economy. And I think the govern- ment recognizes that we have to find a way to preserve the economic livelihoods of Western Canadians as we go through this energy transition. Carbon capture is one way to reduce the emission content of these industries while allowing for a more equitable transition over time.

You were thinking about building your own company when you met the Deep Sky founders. What made you join them?

I’ve been working in carbon capture for over a decade. My master’s was on computational simulations for new materials to capture CO2 from flue stacks. I have over 50 papers published in this space. So I’ve been surrounded by really smart technology people, PhDs, engineers. But it’s very rare that they ever actually make it.

When you’re in academia, you think, ‘Oh, if I just make the best hammer, then I will find the right nail.’ But actually, you have to understand why people want to buy your hammer, and you have to ask them to show you the house they’re trying to build.

With the Deep Sky founders, they’ve actually built a billion-dollar business before. Their pitch was, ‘We’ve built businesses. You know the science. Let’s learn together.’

Climate isn’t a technology problem. Given enough time, enough money, you can solve it. What’s difficult is the policy and financing and project development and energy and storage space.

Sucking CO2 out of the air seems difficult. How do you do it?

There’s three steps. You have a fan that moves air through some sort of filter that captures the CO2. Then you compress that filter using energy, and you inject it underground.

We go to places that are very stable geologic formations. They’re not near any fault lines. We wouldn’t be doing this off the coast of California.

The Earth naturally has stores of gas and liquid underground, so we know that it’s stable and it can stay there. There’s never been a leakage. Western Canada is a perfect place to do it.

What do you think scaled your ability to do hard things?

I’m Filipino. I moved to Canada when I was five years old.

My dad was an engineer in the Philippines, and my mom was a nutritional scientist.

When they moved here, my dad became an auto worker and my mom worked in customer service. They gave up a lot of their lives to give me and my sister a better life. So a lot of what motivated me when I started was making that sacrifice worth it.

What’s the lesson there for other people?

I wasn’t born wealthy or with resources. I was born with an ability to communicate and a brain, and I found a niche in an area where I can make an impact.

I guess my advice would be, understand what it is you’re trying to accomplish and why you’re doing what you’re doing, because it’s a lot easier to keep motivated and be ambitious when times are tough when you have a North Star.

What’s your North Star?

The scary thing about climate change is there’s a delay between emissions and temperature rise, and that delay is 10 to 50 years. So that means that the warming that we’re experiencing today is from a decade ago, and that also means that if you stop emissions today, then we still have 10 years of warming baked in.

At what point did you decide you could reverse that process with science?

During my undergrad, I went to a conference and I saw a professor speak about materials to capture CO2 from the air. I thought it was really interesting, so I went up to the guy after and I asked if I could do research for him, and he said yes.

But we just didn’t click. He told me I wasn’t good enough to do my PhD with him.

I thought, ‘Well, no, I think I am.’

And so I applied to every school in the world. The thing that actually ended up propelling me into this field was proving this professor wrong.

Spite is a very powerful motivator.

Feature image courtesy Unsplash.