Last year, Innovate BC and the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program provided a combined total of $2 million in research and development funding to help 14 companies pilot their technologies and create new jobs across B.C.
The program helps small and medium sized businesses design, build, and operate a pilot plant or small demonstration of their technology while helping to solve real world problems.
By providing up to $200,000 in funding for each project, the B.C. Fast Pilot program enables B.C. technology companies to demonstrate the impact of their product, measure the value of their solution, and encourage customer adoption.
This fourth round of funding included CRWN.ai, a startup founded in the Okanagan in 2022.
Kelowna’s CRWN.ai is focused on predicting failures on transmission towers and eliminating related black-outs, wildfires, and grid inefficiencies.
Unlike traditional methods that require human line-of-sight assessment, CRWN.ai’s devices are installed on power poles to monitor for electrical discharge to then identify or predict multiple issues.
As the startup builds out a portfolio of patents, CRWN.ai’s mission is to provide real-time automated monitoring and insights into a customer’s infrastructure—reducing downtime, improving reliability, and contributing to a greener infrastructure, according to cofounder Eric Miller.
“A high percentage of maintenance costs and wildfires in the power industry are attributed to electrical discharge,” explained Miller, who serves his startup as President, in 2023.
“CRWN.ai’s real-time monitoring and predictive capabilities have the potential to significantly reduce these costs and improve overall infrastructure reliability,” the entrepreneur said.
Miller cofounded CRWN alongside David Loydon, who functions as head of operations, and head and product Brittany Courvoisier-Nicol.
This year, the team received nearly $800,000 from Emissions Reduction Alberta to deploy their clean-tech innovation in Alberta through a $1.6M project.
“Government of Alberta and ERA funding reduces friction for utilities interested in adopting new technologies like CRWN.ai.,” Miller noted recently, summarizing the win-win scenario like so: “Utilities can get the full benefit of CRWN.ai’s tech to identify faulty or degraded transmission lines without the associated cost and CRWN.ai can move closer to wide-scale deployment.”
The investment was among a total of $33.7 million announced across 13 projects.
Since established in 2009, the ERA has committed over $900 million toward almost 300 projects.
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