Business Climate: Stephen Lake’s Jetson is breathing new life into green home heating

High-tech phenom Stephen Lake rose to fame for his smart glasses and other wearable devices. But after selling his Kitchener-based company North (formerly Thalmic Labs) to Google in 2020, he aimed to revolutionize a consumer item that’s far less likely to feature in any James Bond film: heat pumps.

After selling North for an undisclosed sum—the Globe and Mail reported an unconfirmed US$180 million—the co-founder began helping early-stage companies focused on climate. He noted two key places where consumers choose to purchase fossil fuels: when filling up their cars and when heating their homes. The EV market was already quite evolved, but the same couldn’t be said for heat pumps—even though home heating is one of the biggest culprits when it comes to global CO2 emissions.

In fact, according to the Canada Energy Regulator, energy used for heating residential and commercial buildings accounts for 16 percent of all energy used in Canada, and 13 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. Statistics Canada data shows that, in 2023, just 7 percent of Canadian homes were heated with a heat pump.

The energy savings of heat pumps are significant. According to Natural Resources Canada, natural gas heating systems range from 62 to 90 percent efficiency. By contrast, heat pumps are 190 percent efficient—that is, the system moves nearly two units of heat for every unit of electricity it uses.

“When you start to look at the numbers, your home actually produces about as many emissions as driving an internal combustion car [per year], and it’s one of the biggest categories of CO2 emissions out there,” says Lake. “That hasn’t seen as much attention, and there’s not as much awareness around how big of an impact it actually has.”

Problem is, heat pumps are pricey—often $20,000 or more before rebates—and the process of buying and installing them is rarely straightforward. Unlike the electric car market, where several top players dominate the field, the heat pump market is fragmented and confusing, and comes with complicated installation requirements and permits.

Once he started delving into the industry, Lake found that there wasn’t one particular roadblock; rather, there were inefficiencies at every stage, from manufacturing to distribution and from sales to installation, with many businesses taking a cut along the way.

The answer was to create Jetson, a vertically integrated, direct-to-consumer company that works with an original equipment manufacturer—the same one that produces for top brands—to make heat pumps, then takes care of the sales, permitting and installation using a streamlined, tech-driven process that spares buyers many of the common headaches. It also saves them thousands of dollars: with rebates, some are paying as little as $2,000.

Based in North Vancouver, Jetson has started installing in two markets—Vancouver and Denver, where they bought an existing heat pump business—with plans to quickly expand to other locations throughout North America.

Consumers have become accustomed to making purchases with a few simple clicks and having products show up days later, according to Lake.

“So we said, ‘How do we make it much more like that to get a heat pump?’” says Lake, a self-professed “architecture nerd.” The company produced software to automate processes including permit and rebate applications; they also added remote controls to their heat pumps, as well as whole-home energy and air quality monitoring through a Jetson app.

At just over a year old, Jetson has installed hundreds of heat pumps; it has also attracted the attention of investors, among them UBC’s Creative Destruction Lab, an accelerator in the clean energy and climate arena.

“We knew how successful Stephen had been with his prior company, North. If you take a successful person like that, a repeat founder, and they come into the climate tech space, which is where we do all of our investing, that’s super interesting to us,” says Tom Boddez, partner with Vancouver-based Active Impact Investments.

It’s a huge win for climate if everybody moves away from fossil fuels and into heat pumps, he says, and many consumers are keen—but ultimately it comes down to dollars and cents, and a seamless process.

“The idea that someone could basically show up at your door and say, ‘Hey, would you put a heat pump in your house if we could do it for free or close to free?’ I think you’d get a lot of yeses,” says Boddez. “It’s been a short period of time and already they’ve done a lot of installations, and they’re one of the faster-growing companies in our portfolio.”

It isn’t all smooth sailing, however. Lake says that because their prices are so much lower than traditional contractors, some homeowners are skeptical. Jetson is also having to correct consumers’ outdated perceptions about heat pumps—especially that they’re noisy and don’t operate well in cold climates. (Their units are rated down to -30 degrees Celsius.) What’s more—there’s a learning curve for installers who aren’t familiar with a more tech-driven process.

Despite the hurdles, Jetson began installing heat pumps last June and business has been brisk, with hundreds of installs between Vancouver and Denver and a healthy waiting list. Lake hopes that, by the middle of 2025, the company will start expanding across Canada.

His number one goal is to get more homes electrified— especially given that 70 percent of homes today have a gas furnace, and just 10 percent have a heat pump.

“To meet our climate goals, we have to get to 100 percent of homes being heated electrically. The technology is already there, and it’s been there for a long time. It’s a matter of making the adoption easy enough for homeowners, and making it make sense financially, which is what we’re trying to move the needle on,” says Lake, who also wants to inspire industry-wide change in the same way Tesla did with electric cars.

“Every single day we’ve got teams upgrading homes to heat pumps and knocking another gas furnace off the face of the earth,” he says. “So we’re pretty happy about that.”