The company that now builds machinery for Chevron began in a Vancouver garage.
Brett Henkel had worked at QuestAir Technologies, a gas purification company, and then left. In 2007, he co-founded Inventys, working out of his garage. Karen Miller, another QuestAir alumna, later became Svante's vice-president of finance. They were not starting from nothing: they had spent years learning how to pull gases apart with adsorption.
Carbon prices were uncertain, governments were fickle, and investors preferred software.
The idea they carried into the garage was simple to say and hard to build. Instead of washing flue gas with chemicals, put a material that grabs carbon dioxide on rotating beds, and let it capture and release the gas in a cycle.
Nothing about the climate business was kind in 2007. Carbon prices were uncertain, governments were fickle, and investors preferred software. The company survived long enough to find patient backers. Chevron Technology Ventures made its first investment in 2014.
The turn came with scale. In 2019 the company renamed itself Svante, after the Swedish scientist who first used models to link atmospheric carbon dioxide to temperature. It raised US$100m in a 2021 Series D, with Suncor and Chrysalix among the investors, and then US$318m in December 2022, led by Chevron with Temasek, 3M Ventures and GE Vernova joining.
That money was meant for steel, not research. A pilot ran at Chevron's Kern River facility in California, and Svante broke ground on a factory in Burnaby in 2022 to mass-produce the filters. In 2024, Canada Growth Fund committed up to C$100m.
The price of that ambition is exposure. Capturing carbon is only worthwhile if governments or customers pay for it, and the company has no revenue figures public. Chief executive Claude Letourneau said in 2022 he was optimistic about reaching unicorn status, a private valuation of US$1bn, though no valuation has been disclosed.
The founder's lesson is the garage. The idea that is now a US$490m-plus enterprise began with one engineer leaving a company he knew and betting that the same chemistry could be pointed at a bigger problem.