Mather Carscallen didn’t know what to expect when he entered Innovacorp’s inaugural Clean Tech Open.
Carscallen said all he really wanted to do was to learn how to expand his Halifax startup, SABRTech Inc. (formerly Marine Arctic Antarctic Technologies Inc.), which is developing technology to mass produce micro-algae for use in biofuel and other products.
On Tuesday, however, SABRTech was named the winner of the contest and awarded $100,000 in cash, a $200,000 negotiable seed investment, and in-kind business building services, beating out nine other clean technology companies in the United States, Serbia, Denmark, the Netherlands and Nova Scotia.
“I was looking for just as much feedback and constructive criticism on both our business plan and the technology itself as I could possibly get,” Carscallen said. “So that was my sort of ambition coming in to this.”
The announcement was made at the Innovacorp Enterprise Centre in the Life Sciences Research Institute on Summer Street.
The two-year-old company, located in Herring Cove, is in the midst of setting up a lab and working on a micro-algal bioreactor that effectively produces micro-algal biomass at an industrial level.
Carscallen said his goal is to provide a means to mass-produce micro-algae to supply the global aviation industry with a biofuels source, and the funding makes the “dream of creating a truly sustainable alternative fuel a reality.”
“We’re working right now to produce a prototype, so our goal is within the next three years to have a commercial plant up and running.”
The money will be used on infrastructure, staff and developing the technology itself, said the doctoral student at Dalhousie University.
By the end of the summer, he expects to have five employees hired.
“Our technology marks a new beginning for micro-algal biofuels, one that is not just cheaper or easier to maintain, but that reduces the number of steps needed from actually growing to harvesting the oil.”
The province, through Innovacorp, launched the Nova Scotia Clean Tech Open last September.
Sixty-five submissions were received from early-stage clean technology companies as far away as China, Europe, the Caribbean, the United States and across Canada. About half of those submissions were from Nova Scotia companies.
That number was whittled down to the final 10, at which point they were asked to submit a business plan and make an in-person pitch to a five-member panel of judges.
Thomas Rankin, investment manager at Innovacorp, said the goal was to “find some fantastic companies in which to invest” and help them establish a presence in the province.
When the competition was launched, he didn’t know what to expect but said he was pleased with the overall results and impressed with the “breadth and the quality of both the teams and the technology.”
“The challenge, really, and where we put most of our effort in, was finding those international companies, and to be honest, we didn’t know what was going to show up.”
The 10 finalists, which included Amarok Industries and Algae Energy, both from Halifax, ran the gamut of proposing new lighting technology, electric vehicles, ocean energy and biofuels.
“The interesting thing about clean tech is that it’s so broad,” Rankin said. “I mean it’s really more of a business philosophy than a sector, as such, because it touches across a number of different sectors.”
While SABRTech was named the winner, Rankin said the quality of the submissions was such that Innovacorp is interested in working with some of the other finalists, although he declined to name them.
“Two or three other companies on that list of top 10, we could foreseeably work with,” he said.
“We’ll be in formal discussions with at least one.”
(rzaccagna@herald.ca)
Article source: http://thechronicleherald.ca/business/89791-halifax-firm-behind-algae-to-fuel-technology-wins-clean-competition
