MKB – 2025 Annual General Meeting 

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Last week, we hosted our limited partners, portfolio companies, advisors, and other friends of the firm for MKB’s Annual General Meeting. MKB was delighted to reconnect with all who could join us in Montreal for the thoughtful sessions and comprehensive agenda, as summarized below.   

Keynote Speaker: Stephen Poloz, Former Governor of the Bank of Canada 

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We were fortunate to hear from Stephen Poloz, the Former Governor of the Bank of Canada, who delivered a riveting keynote amidst the historic geopolitical climate. Evoking themes from his book “The Next Age of Uncertainty”, Poloz discussed the cyclical patterns of past industrial revolutions, and posited that this latest iteration, predicated on the AI boom and advancements in digitization, will be no different. As we enter the fourth revolution, his overarching message outlined expectations of a decade of turmoil ahead, suggesting structural volatility within the global economy. Poloz counterbalanced this with underlying optimism for strategic opportunities amidst the uncertainty. On the energy transition front, Poloz underscored the projected rise in global energy demand, highlighting the role that Canada’s cleantech ecosystem will play in tandem with Canada’s conventional energy complex. He also highlighted the importance of Canada mindfully allocating our resources at home and crafting policies and tax regimes to attract increased foreign investments. 

Presentation: MKB Year in Review 

Our Managing Partner, Antonio Occhionero, set the stage with an overview of the energy transition technology and capital landscape, relevant investment trends, and key opportunities demonstrating scaling potential. Antonio highlighted our latest fund activity, including the recent closing of three MKB-led growth equity investments. These included two Canadian firms, Vancouver-based Cascadia Windows, and Montreal-based IEC Holden, as well as Circuit, a US-based electric ride-share innovator. Antonio also announced the closing of a fundraise by existing portfolio company XNRGY, a catalyzing growth round led by a prominent group of investors. Antonio dove into how the energy transition is funded for scale, noting that $20 billion is deployed for this purpose each year in Canada. The public sector has been, and remains, a key pillar of support to derisk technology for subsequent private sector investment. Antonio noted that specialized firms such as MKB now have a great opportunity to invest in commercial deployment of technologies derisked by this ecosystem.   

Panel: Electrification at Scale 

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Our Partner, Jesse Teichman, was joined by three of our Advisors, Katherine Hamilton, Chair of 38 North, Philippe Dunsky, President of Dunsky Energy + Climate Advisors, and Chris Burghardt, Co-Founder and CEO of Sila Atlantik, to discuss the critical bottleneck created from the acceleration of electrification across the economy: power availability. Our Advisors discussed the fundamental friction points, which come down to cultural and regulatory barriers, with regional grid constraints, transmission congestion, and underinvestment hindering progress. Solutions lie in deploying distributed energy resources, policy innovation to foster better participation of distributed resources, and aligning capital towards flexible, scalable infrastructure. These elements will position grid flexibility, demand management, and resilient and affordable solutions as key growth opportunities for cleantech leaders over the next decade. 

Panel: Built Environment Innovations 

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Our Partner, Chanel Damphousse engaged in a stimulating panel discussion with entrepreneurs Ramtin Attar, Co-Founder and CEO of Promise Robotics and Max Veggeberg, CEO of Tetra Home Services. The group explored the culprits behind low productivity gains across the construction industry versus other industries. This topic is of clear interest to MKB stakeholders, against the backdrop of Canada’s urgent housing accessibility crisis, and the ongoing need to electrify homes. Each presented solutions to build and deploy faster and smart, made possible today by advancements in technology and AI. At the core, our panelists highlighted a future of building which by necessity is digitized and industrialized, underscoring the heightened opportunity to invest in technology productively impacting the construction sector.  

Presentations: Portfolio Updates 

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Our portfolio company leaders provided firsthand updates and shared their business outlooks with respect to market and company growth. We were pleased to welcome James Mirras, Co-CEO of Circuit, Mike Battistel, President of Cascadia Windows, Rob Briscoe, CEO of IEC Holden, Jake Homiller, CEO of CarbiCrete, and Nikhil Vadhavkar, CEO and Co-Founder of Raptor Maps

In Conversation: XNRGY 

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Ken MacKinnon, Co-Founder and Senior Partner of MKB, was joined by Vincent Morin, Chief Operating Officer of XNRGY Climate Systems (XNRGY), for an in-depth one-on-one. XNRGY recently announced the successful completion of a growth equity raise, underscoring the strength of the company’s brisk growth since MKB led its last funding round. XNRGY will use the proceeds to further expand its production footprint and accelerate the deployment of next-generation cooling solutions.  These innovations will help XNRGY’s customers meet the rise in demand for data centers and other mission-critical infrastructure. The discussion explored XNRGY’s rapid manufacturing expansion, the challenges of high-growth execution, and implementing a playbook for operations at scale.  

Networking Reception 

Celebrating MKB’s Montréal roots, our post-AGM gathering offered beer and gin from Québec-based producers Dieu du Ciel, Loop Mission, Bleu Royal, and Gin Guy Lafleur 10. The reception also included a thought-provoking and immersive AI-derived art exposition Swell of spæc(i)es by Josèfa Ntjam.  

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