A national not-for-profit organization, Mitacs empowers Canadian innovation through effective partnerships that deliver solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. It assists organizations in reaching their goals, funds cutting-edge innovation, and creates job opportunities for students and postdocs. These achievements are supported by the Government of Alberta, the Government of Canada, and other provincial and territorial governments.
Mitacs’s programs connect the private and post-secondary sectors, allowing companies to access up-and-coming talent that can help them innovate, boost productivity, and grow. Using a unique and proven internship model, Mitacs matches organizations in need of specific knowledge and skills with highly qualified post-secondary students — and provides funding to cover half the salary costs.
The Mitacs team is passionate about developing the next generation of innovators who will work to fuel Canada’s knowledge-based economy. The organization supports a wide range of disciplines, from science to social innovation, and creates opportunities for college and undergraduate students, as well as postdocs and recent graduates.
“Mitacs is a strategic bridge between businesses and the post-secondary sector,” says Dr. John Hepburn, Mitacs’s CEO. “By pairing skilled talent with partners looking to solve business challenges, we create an opportunity for both to grow and thrive. Mitacs helps bring innovation into reach.”
With a robust leadership team of more than 100 Mitacs Advisors located across the country — including in Calgary, Edmonton, and Lethbridge — and regional hubs in Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, and Montréal, Mitacs is an integral part of Canada’s innovation ecosystem. It drives economic growth and productivity, creating meaningful change to improve quality of life for all Canadians.
Closing the carbon loop: on-site conversion of greenhouse gases
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are soaring to record-breaking levels, but Calgary-based SeeO2 Energy is working to reverse the trend. With a technology based on principles like those applied to recycling glasses, plastics, and metals, the company converts CO2 into carbon monoxide, hydrogen, syngas, and pure oxygen, all of which can be used downstream or sold for profit.
While there are many solutions to capture and utilize CO2 in Canada and across the world, SeeO2 Energy innovates by converting emissions on site. This process helps close the carbon loop and provides solutions to problems such as safety, logistics, and costs of gas transportation.
“Our goal is to transform CO2 from a liability to a profitable asset while reducing the world’s reliance on fossil fuels and lowering our collective carbon footprint at the same time,” says Dr. Paul Addo, Co-Founder and CEO of SeeO2. He and Dr. Beatriz Molero co-founded the start-up after developing the technology while working as PhD students at the University of Calgary.
Like any start-up, SeeO2 Energy did not have enough capital to hire research talent; Mitacs enabled both Dr. Addo and Dr. Molero to earn a monthly salary while building the company and working on their spin-off.
Through the Elevate program, Mitacs also enabled them to continue their research as postdocs while developing their relationship with ATCO, a natural gas and electricity retailer. Thanks to that relationship,
ATCO has later made an investment in SeeO2 Energy and is one of the start-up’s shareholders.
“Thanks to Mitacs’s support, we have been able to successfully receive other public grants — both federal and provincial. Mitacs allowed us to leverage our private capital funds. And due to our Mitacs connections, we have had access to university facilities and infrastructure, which is extremely valuable for our technology,” says Dr. Molero, who acts as the company’s CTO.
SeeO2 Energy has grown to eight full-time employees, 10 industry advisors, four board members, and three strategic partners for field demonstrations. The company’s strategic partners and investors include Repsol, ArcelorMittal, Shell, and ATCO.
Can games make roads safer?
Based in St. Albert, Medidas Digital is on a mission to improve road safety by gamifying skills development and behaviour change for drivers of all ages. In 2019, the start-up began building the TrypScore mobile app, which gathers and analyzes driver risk data and uses challenges, leaderboards, and incentives to enhance drivers’ awareness of their long-held habits and to nudge behavioural improvements.
To encourage adoption, boost engagement, and maximize TrypScore’s impact on road safety, Medidas needed to build real rewards into the user experience. They decided to leverage their rich, aggregated driver data to build out robust business intelligence dashboards that could then be offered to corporate partners in exchange for socially responsible advertising spends and user-earned rewards.
Through Mitacs, Medidas has been able to bring on several top computer software development and IT business analyst students from the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology as paid interns to advance the dashboard projects.
“Our dashboards are coming to life because of these interns,” says Bill Bland, CEO and Founder of Medidas Digital. “Mitacs interns are super-smart. They’re helping us accelerate really important projects to move up the timeline for releasing features and products ahead of schedule.”
The interns’ impact has been felt deeply at Medidas — in fact, the company has hired on six of its former Mitacs interns as full-time employees to date, and they continue to seek out Mitacs students on a regular basis to support on new projects.
Using robotics to traverse hazardous terrains
Edmonton-based Copperstone Technologies manages a fleet of intelligent amphibious robots that are capable of conducting the most hazardous waste remediation and monitoring activities keeping people out of harm’s way, reducing costs and improving efficiencies for their clients.
The company’s HELIX family of robots use a patented combination of screw-propulsion and four-wheel drive technologies to float on water or scroll across any terrain, no matter how wet, muddy, snowy or sticky. At the same time, they’re equipped with state-of-the-art tools to collect soil or water samples, and perform geotechnical measurements required to monitor environmental clean-up efforts.
Partnering with Mitacs since its early days, the company has engaged in local and cross-provincial collaborations with students from the University of Alberta, the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, and the University of British Columbia.
“Mitacs has been an invaluable resource to help launch Copperstone Technologies and grow it to the commercially successful enterprise it is today,” says Craig Milne, CEO of Copperstone Technologies. “Mitacs interns bring diverse skills, fresh perspectives, and increased productivity. They can support special projects and play a key role in our recruitment pipeline. By leveraging their knowledge, enthusiasm, and potential, we support their growth and foster an environment of innovation and learning.”
With the global mine waste management market forecast to grow to more than 282 billion tons by 2028, Copperstone Technologies is on track to achieve multimillion-dollar revenues in the coming years. The company has recently raised $5.8 million USD in a funding round, which will be infused into expanding production to reach new markets and facilitate a greater volume of equipment sales.
The company has already grown from a small team of three founders in 2014 to 25+ employees today, and it counts on Mitacs’s support to continuing expanding sustainably.
Mitacs in Alberta by the numbers
- 2,500+ internships in AB in 2022–23
- 450+ private sector and not-for-profit organizations have hosted interns in AB in 2022–23, 340+ of which were SMEs
- 93% of former interns state the experience was important to their careers
- 59% of industry partners have commercialized or anticipate commercializing the results of their Mitacs projects
About Mitacs
Mitacs is a not-for-profit organization that fosters growth and innovation in Canada by solving business challenges with research solutions from the best academic institutions in the world. Mitacs is funded by the Government of Canada, the Government of Alberta, the Government of British Columbia, Research Manitoba, the Government of New Brunswick, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, the Government of Nova Scotia, the Government of Ontario, Innovation PEI, the Government of Quebec, the Government of Saskatchewan, and the Government of Yukon.
For more success stories, visit https://www.mitacs.ca/en/impact
