Hexoris Inc.

Hexoris Inc. was the New Brunswick R&D startup I co-founded, developing low-carbon graphitized anode materials for the lithium-ion battery supply chain. I served as CEO from its origin as a university project through to my exit in May 2026.

The work

Hexoris began as a chemical engineering capstone design project at UNB. The project pivoted a couple of times before we settled on graphitization, the high temperature process that converts carbon precursors into the graphite used in battery anodes. We paired that with a model built around licensing the process technology to existing producers rather than manufacturing anode material ourselves, since the licensing route required the least capital to demonstrate the core claim. The incumbent graphitization route is energy intensive and costly, so a lower energy requirement would reduce both operating cost and carbon dioxide emissions. In the public terms set by our NBIF coverage, the work concerned both bio-sourced battery materials that aimed to replace oil-derived graphite in electric vehicle supply chains, as well as more efficient processing of oil-derived product. As CEO, I led financial modelling, the commercialization roadmap, pitching, and fundraising, and I contributed to systems design alongside my co-founder.

NBIF Breakthru

In early 2026 Hexoris was selected as a finalist in the NBIF Breakthru Live Finale, one of five companies chosen from more than 80 New Brunswick ventures, competing for $200,000 in equity investment. Reaching that stage confirmed that the problem mattered and that our framing of it was credible, and it gave us a clear view of what a serious raise would require.

What was hard

The difficulties were straightforward, and I do not think they were unusual for deeptech. Technical validation was costly, since the experiments that would have de-risked the process were expensive enough that we could not run as many as we wanted on the capital available. Finding the right people at the right time was difficult, given that the specialists we needed were neither abundant nor inexpensive. Reliable information about the anode materials industry was hard to obtain from the outside, so a large part of the work was building a network from scratch. The team made meaningful progress on all three fronts, and still the validation timeline and the capital intensity did not match the stage we were at.

The exit

I exited Hexoris in May 2026 to pursue new work. I wrote a longer reflection on the experience in Ten Months with Hexoris.