BC Business
The CEOs and founders behind these companies are innovating the "old" way of doing things
Change is happening all around us. Much of that, of course, comes from the tech sector—but not all of it. For our annual feature on companies in B.C. making noise, we’re focusing on those that are innovating in old industries. Sure, we bent that definition a little bit: many wouldn’t call browsers “old,” but they haven’t changed all that much in almost a generation. The goal was to find businesses in the province that are raising the bar in their chosen industries, or changing them altogether. We did that—and hope you enjoy reading all about them.
All kinds of ideas are coming to life in a design lab attached to Patkau Architects’ office in Vancouver. Husband-and-wife duo John and Patricia Patkau launched their architecture firm in 1978. Ever since then, no two undertakings have been the same. From residential and cultural projects to educational and research hubs, the firm has made its mark in nearly every design category.
“I’ve always been a curious person,” John Patkau says. Some of his company’s iconic creations include UBC’s Beaty Biodiversity Centre, the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver, the Audain Art Museum in Whistler and the Tula House on Quadra Island. “We’re the ultimate generalists who flit from flower to flower,” he adds.
Now, after 47 years in business, Patkau is introducing a new furniture line under the name Patkau Studio. The threads of this line can be traced back to the proprietary materials being invented in the workshop attached to Patkau Architects’ office. Some 15 years ago, the company was invited to design temporary shelters for ice skaters in Winnipeg. “We used an unusual kind of plywood to make these shelters,” John Patkau recalls. His team developed a way to take advantage of the plywood’s characteristics, and the resulting structures were revered around the world to the point that they were recreated in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to celebrate the potential of plywood. The shelters also won Patkau Architects a design prize from Moscow.
“Patkau Studio is going to be the name of all of the activities that we take on that aren’t architecture,” says its co-founder. From furniture to sculptures, this new arm of business is purely dedicated to experiments and innovation.
First up is lighting. The company’s Minima lights, starting at $950, are available in a range of sizes, from floor to table lamps. They can be spotted Canada-wide at stores like Vancouver’s Inform and Calgary’s Dwell Modern, and they’re made with a unique blend of paper, polymer and cotton that gives the material a soft, paper-like appearance without compromising durability. “There is no other lighting product out there that has this material as a central part of its construction,” John Patkau maintains. “It’s been a journey of invention and exploration that has been very rewarding. We’ve become really addicted to the freedom with which we can work at this scale, which you don’t have when you’re doing large buildings because of the constraints of building codes, budgets, engineering, et cetera.”
The new venture, according to its co-founder, is a natural and satisfying complement to their architectural practice. With options for made-to-order tables, stools and chairs on the way, the firm’s team of 22 is looking to make high-quality design more accessible. “And by that I mean affordable,” says John Patkau. “Where most people can’t afford a multi-million-dollar house, they can afford a beautiful object in their apartment.”
Starting on this at an older age—John Patkau is 77—has been “so much fun,” he says. “The reason we’re turning it into a business is because if it becomes successful, then it will support a much bigger effort in terms of innovation in the future. We will have more resources to play with, and we can do more interesting things.”—R.R.
When the brass at UBC’s faculty of applied science and its Sauder School of Business decided to join forces to create the New Venture Design course, the ideal, perfect outcome was probably something like VanAir Design.
The interdisciplinary course brings together engineering and business students over two terms to generate an idea, develop a product and form its business case. “The entire class of 40 or 50 students was locked in a room until we emerged as groups of six—three engineers, three business students,” remembers James Higgins.
Higgins, an engineering student, found his way to Vick Yau, who was working on his business degree. “We formed our group based on a shared interest in sustainability,” says Higgins, who had a background in building science. “Every time you open up part of a building for air flow, there’s an acoustic consideration.”
The pair started VanAir Design over a decade ago and set out to manufacture doors with built-in ventilation and an integrated system that circulates between rooms, providing better air quality and more consistent temperatures. They also figured out a way to merge a sleek look and sound suppression equivalent to a solid-core door. “We call it door-tex,” says Yau with a laugh. “We use acoustic foam that acts like a muffler. So as the sound is going in and out of the door, it’s absorbed on both sides. I jokingly say it’s like the moon landing in door technology. That’s as exciting as it’s going to get.”
The use case is evident in both residential homes—laundry closets, for instance, need to be ventilated and ideally keep sound in—while the benefits for office and commercial spaces are huge for the environment in terms of keeping rooms temperature controlled as well as restricting noise.
And while it’s technically been operating for about 12 years, one gets the sense VanAir is just getting started. Last year, the company had three employees in its warehouse facility in Burnaby. This year, it’s up to eight, with plans to expand to 20 in the near future. It’s also partnered with Washington-based Lynden Door Inc. to make its doors at scale. All told, the company has supplied doors to some 500 clients across North America, including 60 doors for the renovation of the top two floors of the Vancouver Public Library’s central branch.
The company has expanded its business model, too, to include making components for other door manufacturers. “There are lots of different door manufacturers in North America—they all make a similar product, and all buy components,” says Yau.
The end goal? Changing something, even just a little bit, that’s been part of the world for centuries. “Doors haven’t changed in the last hundred years,” says Yau. They open and close and don’t do much else. Windows have evolved—single, double, triple pane. We think the door can do a lot more in the context of your home or building. That’s kind of our mandate.”—N.C.
Redbrick is one of Victoria’s largest tech companies. But the common joke you hear about it is that it’s not really a tech company at all. Founded in 2011 by Tobyn Sowden, Redbrick was initially a digital marketing firm. Eventually, though, it moved toward collecting a portfolio of companies that help digital entrepreneurs build their businesses. These include properties Redbrick has acquired, like Animoto, Delivra and Leadpages, along with those that started within the firm, like Assembly, a digital media technology company (which was eventually sold to St. Joseph’s Communications), and a browser tool founded in 2016 called Shift.
How most people use browsers hasn’t fundamentally changed in some time. You likely use Chrome or Edge or Safari and that’s mostly that. But Shift, which integrates all your apps into one browser to focus on workplace productivity, is trying to change that.
“The big key is having all your apps in one window,” says Neil Henderson, CEO of Shift. “One browser window for everything you use on your computer each and every day. So you’re not looking out to other windows or apps for Slack, Spotify, Skype. Everything is integrated into its own window. It saves time and you’re not context-switching with eyeballs back and forth.”
And it’s not just for apps, explains Henderson. Shift has workspaces that users can dedicate different tabs to. “Right now there’s all sorts of stuff coming at you on your desktop from different angles,” he says. “We can customize all of that and have the notifications within Shift regardless of the app it’s coming from, and then mute or silence them if needed. It’s really just letting you work harder and more efficiently in your browser.”
The reality of being inside a company like Redbrick is that things are always changing. Often, you’ll hear executives at large firms say that working at their company is like working on a few different startups because there are so many disparate things to do. At Redbrick, that’s self-evident.
Henderson has held roles at many different companies in Redbrick in his more than 10 years on the team. Recently, he was the CEO of Redbrick’s software division, Rebase. That company merged with Shift and Henderson took on the top role last year. With some 65 staff, Shift is now the biggest company at Redbrick.
Henderson describes his primary goals as “respecting the SaaS and productivity legacies and bringing them forward,” and moving the company toward becoming more of a general-purpose browser.
“It’s a bit farfetched to say that we want to replace Chrome, period,” he admits. “But the browser market is so big. Everyone is browsing on multiple devices. The minute percentages of market shares of browsers are humungous businesses. We’re on a mission to, without fail, be considered in the top 10 browsers worldwide. I think that’s doable.”
Typically, browsers are marketed to people who are tech savvy. “Generally speaking, very few people are looking to try a new browser every day,” says Henderson. “But search is changing rapidly; most search occurs within the browser. My mother-in-law isn’t querying to search engines to the same extent she was six months ago. We’re trying to think about people that browser companies don’t.”—N.C.
Metal processing company pH7 Technologies has come a long way in a short time. We sat down with CEO Mohammad Doostmohammadi at his office in East Vancouver to dig into how pH7 is changing the mining industry
You founded pH7 in 2021. The company has grown quickly—you have this office here and a facility in Burnaby and have raised a lot of money. Why did you start the company? What was the vision?
pH7 comes from my vision and passion about water and the environment. I’m a mining engineer, a chemical engineer, and I have been practising in mineral processing and wastewater management for the last 15 years. I moved to Canada from Iran about seven years ago. I saw a challenge in the mining industry, in mineral processing and wastewater management, in the amount of water required for the extraction of metals. And most of the water is wastewater that needs to be treated. Some can’t be.
The idea for pH7 is thinking outside the box to eliminate wastewater: a new system that extracts metals with the same efficiency and economical unit while not generating any wastewater. We came up with a closed-loop system.
So you don’t eliminate wastewater like some other companies. Your process just doesn’t generate it at all?
Exactly. We provide recycling and mining industries with a processing solution that doesn’t generate any wastewater. It’s a new process. Our processing plant in Burnaby can handle 5,000 kilos per day of raw materials. We extract critical minerals from those materials without generating any wastewater. And so we process the materials in a sustainable and economical manner.
What has been the mining industry’s reaction to this?
They love the process we have. We introduced it as complementary to the market: processing materials they can’t process easily—ones that are unextractable or un-smeltable. Energy is another thing we’re saving through this process. Smelters melt everything down in 1,500-degree furnaces and get less than 1 percent of the metals they’re trying to extract. We attack the 1 percent.
You’ve raised a significant amount of capital as well.
We closed the Series A last year. We raised US$16 million from Canadian and American investors. We got some funding as well from the federal and provincial governments. Overall, we’ve raised about C$35 million in both grant and equity financing. We’re scaling up the process, building more around the world and expanding nationally; we’re going into the U.S. market, Europe, Asia.
Who are your main competitors? Is anyone doing what you’re doing on this level?
Our major competitors are the existing operations—processing plants, smelters. We’re an alternative to smelters, a complementary process. As far as new technologies out there, especially in PGM [platinum, palladium, rhodium, ruthenium, osmium and iridium], I don’t know anyone commercialized at this point.
Are you planning on raising more money? Can you keep growing at this rate?
The next funding round will be [this year] or next year. I believe that’s the pace we have to keep if we want to be a successful company competing in this market. Commodities are expensive. If you want to compete with multinational companies, the only way you can do it is through growth.—N.C.
Métis entrepreneur Anita Pawluk was always determined to balance family with her work. She started her career at Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt, working in the water mapping department. She then earned a CPA designation and moved on to head accounting at Victoria-based book and collectible marketplace AbeBooks, which was then an independent startup. There, Pawluk saw the potential of technology to streamline processes, which inspired her to start ventures of her own.
In 2010, Pawluk co-founded RaceRocks 3D to improve legacy training systems for the Canadian military. “The older technology didn’t have a lot of room for large files, so we used innovative techniques to increase the fidelity of those models,” she explains. “Trainees 10 years ago used to [go through] a very large training program offered by the Canadian Armed Forces that cost millions of dollars to build, and then they would go home, turn on their Xbox and have a more immersive experience due to the virtual world.”
RaceRocks aimed to bridge that gap by modernizing military training. As a leader in training and simulation technology, RaceRocks offers distributed learning to the aerospace and defence sectors. Its clients include Boeing, the Royal Canadian Navy and, most recently, Lockheed Martin. One of its products is a boat simulator that helps train Navy operators using a full-motion platform and virtual reality technology. The online system allows trainees to practice under different sea conditions, times of day and locations, providing an immersive and cost-effective training experience while reducing human risk at sea.
For example, with Boeing, “to ground a plane just to train on it is super expensive,” says Pawluk. RaceRocks built a VR simulator that can be used to teach Boeing trainees the proper procedure for packing away oxygen masks on airplanes without stepping on an actual plane.
The company also has specific programs (such as Kishkayhta) dedicated to increasing Indigenous participation in STEAM fields.
Today, what started as a 3D-modelling business focused on military training has evolved into a software design powerhouse. Pawluk credits the COVID-19 pandemic for accelerating the need for innovative training solutions. “It disrupted learning,” she says, “and now, with a lot of people focusing on the future of training, that even gets me more excited.”
In 2024, RaceRocks inked a $1.6-million deal with Lockheed Martin Canada to enhance military training with simulations and AI. Over the next three years, the goal is to develop smart, personalized training tools that make learning faster and more effective. As Pawluk explains, this should lead to more flexible, modular training systems, where changes can be made quickly—so if something needs to be modified in a course, instead of overhauling the entire system, revisions will become as simple as a swipe-in and swap-out.
“Our big, hairy, audacious goal at RaceRocks is to create a world of limitless learning,” says Pawluk. The pandemic, she reflects, “levelled the playing field” and helped RaceRocks double in size—both in revenue and employees. Today, the company is supported by a team of more than 30 people and generates around $5 million in annual revenue.
Pawluk is optimistic. “We’re at the right place and we’re working with the right partners. So not only are we applying the technology of today, we’re also thinking of how we’re going to apply the technology of tomorrow.”—R.R.