Since its inception, Queen’s Partnerships and Innovation’s Wings program has helped a diverse, eclectic range of entrepreneurs and innovators successfully launch their businesses. Run by a team experienced in helping startups take flight and drawing on experts in a range of fields, the program has taught participants how to recognize their strengths, focus on what it is they are really selling, and identifying their customers. The program welcomed its final cohort of fledgling startups this January 2023. These are their stories.
Siziwe Bebe, Demagel’s CEO and founder has plans for creating a polymer electrolyte membrane she hopes will be a better alternative in terms of operational efficiency, safety, sustainability, and cost. The Wings program is helping Demagel get there.
A trained chemical engineer from Queen’s University with a strong background in polymer kinetics and electrochemistry, and experience in the energy storage technologies, she had the idea of founding Demagel when she joined the WE-CAN Project, which was created by Queen’s Partnerships and Innovation (QPI) to encourage female entrepreneurs. She and her partner had been doing a lot of consulting, but hadn’t much cared for the way, they were treated as self-employed outsiders. Perhaps running their own company would be a better experience, they thought, and Demagel, a “scientific technical consulting company”, was born in April 2022. Its mission, Bebe says, is “to accelerate promising green tech” across a range of industries as well as working closely with universities to develop promising innovative technologies, affordably.
Through WE-CAN, Bebe connected with various members of QPI’s team when she was looking for help patenting another idea she’d had. She learned about Wings, which sounded like an excellent next step for someone not versed in the world of business. But there was a challenge. The bulk of the other companies enrolled in the program had a more tangible product. Rick Boswell, one of their QPI contacts, wondered if Demagel had something like that.
In fact, Demagel did: a membrane that she had worked on many years previously when still in her home country. Specifically created for use in electrolyzers and fuel cells, it was created out of a hydrocarbon-polymer. But they’d never taken it to the next step. This now appeared to be an opportunity. Before the Wings program had even begun, Demagel had pivoted to a degree. Today the goal is to create a product that matches the Perfluorosulfonic acid (PFSA) composite membranes, widely touted, she says, as the “best out there.”
Speaking of the Wings program, she says, “At first we thought it was so difficult.”
But she quickly changed her mind. “Wings taught us how to approach the business aspect,” of their work says Bebe. Above all, she says, Wings’ great benefit was to help Demagel clarify its “value proposition” – the idea or statement that encapsulates what it is that others need or would like that you can give them.
“When we started,” she says, “we just didn’t know how to organize our ideas. Wings taught us to put things in perspective and summarize.” Before, if they were trying to explain to a potential investor what they were doing, she says, they would have pumped out pages and pages about their inventions. Working with what they learned in Wings, they understood, that “we could just put it on a single slide,” She and Demagel benefitted too from the experiences of their fellow participants – even when working remotely. “Questions from other participants, such as ‘Did you try this, did you try that?’ gave us an idea about the similarities of business”, she says.
Since finishing the program, Demagel has continued down the path that Wings showed them. They continue to work on refining the membrane that they have developed and thanks to their involvement with QPI and in the Wings program, they were admitted into GreenCentre Canada’s Advance-ON program, where GreenCentre personnel provide technical services to cleantech start-ups, driving their early-stage innovations to market faster. “We gained this opportunity thanks in no small part to the pitching skills that we learned during Wings,” she says.
Queen’s Partnerships and Innovation (QPI) offered the Wings Accelerator program, along with many other programs and services, with support from the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario, through the ScaleUp Platform, an initiative led by Invest Ottawa in Eastern Ontario and in which QPI is a regional partner.