Ten Months with Hexoris

I co-founded Hexoris Inc. during my final year of chemical engineering at UNB, after a capstone design project became a serious attempt to commercialize low-carbon battery materials. The ten months that followed were the most concentrated period of learning I have had, and I want to record what actually happened while the details are still clear.

The project did not begin where it ended. It pivoted a couple of times before we narrowed toward a single step in the lithium-ion battery supply chain. We focused on graphitization, the high temperature process that converts carbon precursors into the graphite used in battery anodes, since the incumbent route is energy intensive and expensive, and a process that lowered the energy requirement would reduce both operating cost and carbon dioxide emissions.

The business model narrowed in parallel, and we eventually concentrated on licensing the graphitization process technology to existing producers rather than manufacturing anode material ourselves, since the licensing route required the least capital to demonstrate the core claim.

I served as CEO, with responsibility for financial modelling, the commercialization roadmap, pitching, and fundraising, and I contributed to systems design alongside my co-founder. Much of the year was spent building a network in an industry we did not start with any connections to. Reliable information about the anode materials market is difficult to obtain from the outside, so a large part of my work was finding the people who could tell us what was actually true.

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.

The difficulties were straightforward, and I do not think they were unusual for deeptech. Technical validation was costly, and 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, since the specialists we needed were neither abundant nor inexpensive. The team made meaningful progress on these fronts, and still the validation timeline and the capital intensity did not match the stage we were at.

I exited Hexoris in May 2026 to pursue new work, and what I take from these ten months is mostly about sequencing. Deeptech company formation depends on expensive experimental proof, and the order in which a small team spends its limited capital determines whether it ever reaches that proof. I began to understand how to read that constraint earlier, how to choose the version of a business that needs the least capital to demonstrate the core claim, and how to tell the difference between an interesting result and a fundable one. I am carrying that lesson into whatever I build next.