For Canadian climate ventures, proving the technology is often only the beginning.
The harder step is turning that proof into customers, contracts, financing, and repeatable revenue. It is a gap Jamie Moran sees often: a successful pilot, a promising technology, and then a stall before the company can turn technical validation into commercial traction.
As Chief Growth Officer at ClimateDoor, Moran is focused on that middle stage of the market. The firm describes itself as “operators, not advisors,” embedding with climate companies as a commercialization team rather than simply offering strategy from the sidelines. Its work spans energy, agriculture, and critical resources, helping ventures move from pilots and partnerships to bankable offtakes, strategic deals, and global market opportunities.
That operating model has become increasingly important as climate technology companies face long sales cycles, complex regulation, capital-intensive deployment, and a tougher funding environment. Investors are looking for commercial proof, customers are looking for confidence, and founders are being asked to show more than technical milestones.
ClimateDoor is also expanding its role earlier in the ecosystem through ClimateDoor Impact, created through the integration of ClimCanada, to support early-stage climate ventures and improve access to commercialization support, partnerships, and Indigenous procurement pathways.
In the following interview with CleanEnergy.ca, Moran discusses why Canadian climate companies get stuck after pilots, what investors are looking for now, how founders should think differently about go-to-market, and what Canada needs to do to help clean energy companies compete globally.
ClimateDoor describes itself as “operators, not advisors.” In practical terms, what does that change for a climate venture trying to move from promising technology to real market traction?
JM: Most firms hand a founder a strategy and walk away. We do the opposite. ClimateDoor embeds as the company’s commercial team and executes alongside the founder, every day, until deals close.
In practice, that means we stand up a full go-to-market group built from our practitioners and our relationships across the sector. The founder is not getting one consultant. They get the entire commercialization team, all pointed at the same objective.
That team runs on three things: data layers that show where demand actually sits, a deep and segmented network of buyers, investors, and partners, and our own commercialization engine that compresses the go-to-market timeline. Pilots that would normally take a year to line up can be set up in weeks. The difference is not better advice. It is that someone is in the deal with you, doing the work.
The proof is in the portfolio. The companies we have worked with have raised more than $682 million, closed over 150 commercial transactions with us directly, and tapped a network of roughly 9,000 relationships we’ve built over 5 years, many of them in person at events and conferences. We are operators with skin in the game, not consultants writing decks.
You work with companies across energy, agriculture, and critical resources. Where are you seeing the biggest commercialization gaps for Canadian climate ventures right now?
JM: The biggest gap is the one in the middle.
A company runs a successful pilot. The technology performs. Then everything stalls. The pilot proved the science. It did not prove that a buyer will sign a commercial contract, at a real price, on commercial terms. That distance between a working pilot and a paid, repeatable deal is where most Canadian climate companies get stuck, and it has almost nothing to do with how good the technology is.
Canada is very good at de-risking technology. Our early-stage R&D and innovation funding is built for it. Where we fall short is de-risking the market: identifying the buying segments beyond the innovation team, getting through procurement, and finding the people willing to take the bet.
For most corporates, the downside is asymmetric. They get little credit, publicly or internally, for backing a new technology, but they stand to lose a lot if it fails. That asymmetry is what keeps pilots from going commercial. It forces the venture to prove a real change to the buyer’s bottom line before anyone will move, and that proof is usually what is missing.
Raising capital remains one of the hardest parts of scaling climate technology. What are investors looking for today that founders still tend to underestimate?
JM: Commercial proof.
Five years ago, a strong technical milestone could carry a round. Today, especially for hardware and first-of-a-kind projects, investors want to see that someone will actually buy the thing. A signed offtake. A serious letter of intent. A buyer pipeline with names and dates.
Founders assume the risk investors care about most is technology risk. It usually is not. The risk that kills these deals is commercial: whether anyone will pay, and how long it takes to reach revenue.
The second thing founders miss is the capital stack itself. The best capital is stacked, not raised, and priced off revenue and signed contracts. Non-dilutive funding, grants, and project finance are sitting on the table in Canada, and stacked properly they extend runway and take pressure off the equity story. Most founders treat them as an afterthought. Used well, they change the entire conversation with an investor.
ClimateDoor has emphasized partnerships, pilots, and strategic deals as part of its model. How important are early customers and industry partners in helping climate companies become financeable?
JM: For capital-intensive companies, it comes down to a bankable offtake. That is the single most important milestone in making a first-of-a-kind project financeable.
A lender or investor looking at a large clean infrastructure build is really asking one question: who is on the other side of this, and will they pay? A credible, bankable customer answers it. Most of our work is helping a company build the milestones that move a project from non-bankable to bankable, because that is the whole game.
Industry partners do something similar on the validation side. When an established player puts its name, its distribution, or its balance sheet next to an early company, it tells the market the technology is real and deployable.
We also push clients to be honest about risk rather than bury it. A transparent risk register, where a company names what could go wrong and how it is handling it, earns far more investor trust than a deck that pretends every risk is already solved.
Many clean energy and climate companies face long sales cycles, complex regulation, and capital-intensive deployment. How should founders think differently about go-to-market compared with traditional software startups?
JM: The core difference starts with the cost of being wrong.
Software grew up on the Bay Area mantra of build fast and break things, because in software, breaks are cheap. A bug costs you a few days and a quick iteration. Shipping only when you are proud of the product usually means you already shipped too late. And the revenue sits in the OpEx line of your customer’s P&L, where a manager often has the budget authority to just say yes. That is what makes land-and-expand so effective. I built a company in that world. That playbook works there.
Hardware is a different game entirely.
Beyond the high CapEx of climate tech, you are facing a cascade of hurdles that software never sees. Ship too soon and you might miss a critical component and a delivery milestone with it. Long manufacturing lead times mean you take fewer risks on untested assumptions, because one small change can add weeks or months to deployment. And when you do need to change something, you may have to redo certifications from scratch, which drags the whole timeline back again. On top of that, the CapEx itself demands separate funding mechanisms like project finance, which requires bankability, which requires committed offtakes. There are more layers beneath that. The point is that every one of them slows you down.
So founders need to start with the relationship.
Find a corporate investor or early partner willing to grow with you. Set the communication expectations up front, and hold your whole team to them. Call out risks early, to the point of keeping a live risk register in your data room. And be realistic about what you can deliver, because you may only get one shot at it.
It comes down to sequence. Customers, then partners, then capital, in that order. The order is the moat.
ClimateDoor recently brought ClimCanada into the organization as ClimateDoor Impact, with a focus on supporting early-stage climate ventures. How does that expand the role ClimateDoor can play in Canada’s climate innovation ecosystem?
JM: The commercial side of ClimateDoor is built for companies already in market that need to sell, raise, or expand. Impact lets us show up much earlier, for founders who aren’t quite there yet.
It is an Indigenous-governed nonprofit run by cross-cultural operators, and that governance shapes the work. Founders get hands-on help with the things that actually move a company early: tightening the raise, landing the first real customers, building the partnerships that open the right doors later. They also get genuine access to Indigenous partnership and procurement pathways, which for a climate company can be one of the strongest anchor customers in the country.
What expands the role most is who it lets us stand alongside. Impact connects us with funders, philanthropic orgs, accelerators, Indigenous Nations, and other organizations all pointed at the same goal, and those relationships are how we reach more founders, earlier. That is the accessibility piece: more ventures getting real support, sooner.
The early access is the whole point. The habits that decide whether a climate company makes it through the commercial stage are formed years before, when a founder is still choosing who to talk to and which problem to lead with. Impact puts commercialization thinking, the right introductions, and real partnership in front of them at that moment, instead of after two years spent building something the market was never going to buy.
ClimateDoor has also been active in connecting Canadian climate technology with international markets, including Europe. What does Canada need to do better to help its clean energy companies compete globally?
JM: Canada has the technology, the resources, and the talent. What it underuses is its own trade relationships.
Canada is the only G7 country with a free trade agreement with every other G7 member. Those agreements reach 51 countries, more than 1.5 billion consumers, and over 60 percent of global GDP. Most founders treat that as background. It is actually a direct route to customers, and founders need to get far better at using it. A trade mission is not market entry.
We have run three trade delegations into Australia, we are planning one to Costa Rica, we hold deep relationships in Singapore, we helped drive a deal in Africa, and we are exploring work in Hong Kong. The agreements are real, and so is the demand on the other side. Most Canadian companies simply never use them.
Two things would change the picture at home. First, more commercial-stage support, so companies build proof and revenue before they go abroad, rather than going abroad because they could not get traction here. Second, real demand-side pull inside Canada, including from sovereign and Indigenous buyers who can anchor clean infrastructure. A committed domestic buyer does more for a company’s global prospects than any trade delegation.
As Chief Growth Officer, what tells you that a climate venture is truly ready to scale, and what are the warning signs that a company may be trying to grow before it is commercially ready?
JM: Readiness shows up as repeatable commercial revenue, not pilots.
When I see a company with signed commercial contracts, a buyer pipeline that procurement is actively working, and unit economics that hold as it scales the same model into new applications and higher volume, that company is ready to grow. The clearest tell: sales no longer depend on the founder being in the room.
The warning signs are the opposite, and they are common. A company raises a large round or builds out manufacturing on the strength of pilots that never converted to paid, repeatable deals. It treats a successful pilot as commercial validation, when the pilot only ever proved the technology works. And it confuses activity, the press, the awards, the busy top of funnel, with revenue.
Growth built on that foundation does not get cheaper at scale. It gets more expensive. The companies that last earn the right to grow before they try to.