Intelline

Chris and I (Kyle) have known each-other since elementary school. In high school we built an electric car together with a small team of students, and we both went on to study at the University of Waterloo. Chris went into math & accounting, I went into mechanical engineering.

The first spark of an idea came in 2017, with EV adoption on the rise. I’ve always been fascinated by all things complicated, difficult, and physical, and naturally was drawn to the energy and automotive space. There is beauty in the things that power our world in the background, unnoticed, unglamorous, but essential. I was drawn to the problem not so much in the spotlight, aging and ever strained grid infrastructure. The constant need for more efficient hardware with practical implementation. Through a rabbit hole of research I was fascinated with the potential of superconducting technologies, saw the barrier in the high cost of cryocooling, and had an idea for more cost effective cryocoolers. I went to my trusted friend Chris with the idea, and Intelline was born. People ask about the name, its a word we made up from latin, ‘intelligent in nature’.

Fast forward to 2019, we had a lovely multi-layered pulse tube cryocooler prototype designed and fabricated from scratch, along with our own linear helium compressor to power it. Unfortunately there wasn’t a huge market for it and we would have to move mountains as a tiny startup to bring together all the stakeholders for any meaningfully sized superconductor project. Over the holidays at the end of that year, we came across an article on diesel generators, highlighting their terrible inefficiency, yet they remain the only effective option for heavy duty industrial power. We were sitting beside our compressor prototype and that was the lightbulb - “Hey, this compressor design would make a really great engine”. I was always a huge car nerd, and have been sketching designs for engines and car parts since high-school, so the prospect of contributing a game-changing engine to the world was very exciting. We modified the compressor design with piston-mounted valves and added on the necessary combustion hardware, filed the patents, quickly machined a small cross-sectioned prototype, and carted it off to a mining equipment conference in Toronto where it was an instant hit. Customers were so excited even at that stage, and it was clear to us we were building something that customers have been begging for with no one answering the call. Today, we have a real running prototype of our groundbreaking engine design, and are preparing for first customer deliveries at a time when this technology is critical for growing power demand. We’ve come a long way, it’s difficult and painful, but since day 1 I’ve had the same fascination with unnoticed, unglamorous, essential hardware, and I’m eternally grateful to have the chance to contribute to that world of important energy hardware.

I don’t think I ever decided to be a founder. My path is more driven by a need to do something, and a company is just the vehicle to bring vision into reality.

1. Energy equality. Growth and prosperity in the human race is driven by access to energy. In developing countries and remote areas, this resource is severely lacking. Stable, reliable, and affordable access to electricity improves quality of live, period. We have the unique opportunity to create this change in underserved regions, with affordable microgrids based on our generator tech, given that many of these regions already use old inefficient diesel generators that keep costs high and curtail growth. Furthermore, the power concentrations centered on access to oil can be better distributed, as our generator can run on any fuel. Biofuel and other renewable sources allow remote areas to be far more self reliant on their own energy sources. In short, we can improve the worldwide quality of life by ensuring no-one is left behind in access to practical and affordable energy.
2. Practical transition to zero emissions. We believe in climate change. We don’t care if you don’t. People can argue about this until they are blue in the face, all the while massive diesel engines continue to tick on powering our world economy because no one has provided an actual effective replacement. Our opinion is that real change is not hype, not a fad, and it doesn’t happen overnight. We made an engine that runs on anything, and uses less so it makes financial sense. Stuck with your diesel supply chain? No problem, use less, save money. Soon enough we’ll have thousands of customers using our engines, enough that it makes sense to develop robust supply chains for alternative fuels at scale. With real scale in alternative fuels and customers to use them, costs come down. All the while even the most steadfast climate denier has been using our engine, loving the rugged reliability we’ve come to know from the last 100 years of diesel engines, and then sees that the cost of say, ammonia fuel, is now lower than diesel, and no changes are needed to run it. That’s pretty cool. Our vision is that within 20 years we can do our part in the energy sector to get heavy duty industrial power to zero emissions, and we have a realistic way to do it.