Thank you so much, Madam Chair, members of the committee and my colleagues from industry. It's a great honour to be here to talk about how we may be able to take part and inform the discussion on Canada's export of environmental and clean technologies on goods and services.
I'll take a bit of a departure from my colleagues. I think I'm one of the only software companies to talk about software exports and what they mean.
My name is Hari Subramaniam, as Madam Chair has introduced me. I head up strategic growth and global sales for Opus One Solutions. We believe we are probably a good fit as a litmus test or a canary in the coal mine with respect to how we've been able to garner help from domestic support, from the government's policies and regulations, while at the same time we can give you a sense of the competitive landscape that we and other colleagues in the sector face.
As a quick snapshot, Opus One was Canadian-founded. We have two offices, Richmond Hill in Toronto and downtown Toronto. Hopefully, we will be moving out for more talent across the country. Opus One is one of the few companies that has been named four times to the top 100 clean-tech companies globally. We share that honour with CarbonCure in Nova Scotia.
We started to build our pilot technology in about 2016, really moving to commercialization in 2019-20. We have grown about 500% in employment, hitting well past about a hundred this year, and we've actually grown during COVID, or the global pandemic. That's the uniqueness of the sector that we're in. Overall on revenues we're at about 300% since about 2016, and we're one of the few leading companies from a software perspective to facilitate energy transition. Our customers tend to be utilities, whether they're privately owned or government-owned.
I should probably provide you with a sense of how we segment our customers and how we serve from Canada internationally.
One of our other unique attributes is that we've actually grown into about six to seven countries between 2020 and 2021. We've actually gone international and global during the global pandemic, and 90% of our staff are Canadian-based.
First, I'd love to thank the committee and the governments writ large for the policy framework and the funding associated that have really helped to drive-start our start-up nation, giving birth to companies like ours. We just happen to be in the clean-tech sector. One of the stats that I do not have, and I'm not sure if it's robustly there, is the split between hardware from clean tech; money that leaves us, whether it be renewable developers that are Canadian or are elsewhere; software; and then services in clean tech as an export quantity.
From a software perspective, I would think Canada is one of the biggest exporters of clean-technology software globally. How do we help that sector? That's probably why I'm here to share my thoughts.
I'll give a shout-out to a Canadian company that is a little less known, but pretty big here actually, called CGI out of Montreal. They're one of the largest clean-technology services firms globally. I think there's a lot of diamonds in the rough that perhaps through this process we can unearth.
I'll get to the two questions that, I think, were posed. One is, what is going well? I think we've built a great ecosystem for start-ups: the federal agencies, the incubators. We have a wonderful job done with the trade commissioners engaging in a meaningful but also a metric-driven manner to help Canadian companies export abroad. I think from ISED to SDTC to NRCan, they've done a fantastic job with IRAP in terms of how to construct funding or leveraging to help companies grow. I think EDC and BDC have done a good job from a venture cap perspective. I'll give credit to Diana Cartwright from the trade commission for really shaping that organization. We have definitely been blessed and have benefited from that.
There's some great funding with collaboration, the Canadian-Indian industrial partnership, the Canada-U.K. funding in terms of helping Canadian companies enter the market by collaborating with one of their own. I think they've been a big benefit. I would like to commend Amanda Wilson and Cynthia Handler,from the departmental side, for really leading that and paying attention to companies like ours and our growth.
A lot of MOUs that have been signed by the government in innovation have actually helped us, and the same thing with FedDev in terms of scaled and continued growth. However, having said all of that, which has built the ecosystem, one of the things I'd like to share is that I think we've done a great job on start-ups, but I think we haven't really looked holistically at the scale-up of companies. I think there are gaps in the scale-up aspect.
Opus One Solutions is no longer a start-up. We're a scale-up, so where do we go?
There are a couple of things to point out. Every jurisdiction in the world is revolving around clean tech. They want a sector to be grown there. They want taxes to be paid to their jurisdiction. What I would urge departments in the government to do is to actually take a competitive benchmarking. I personally don't think we do that well as a nation.
What I mean by that is that Germany and the U.K. are really pushing in tandem with companies in their jurisdictions to move globally—more, I would say, than we are. In terms of whether it be financing or giving funding to enter the market to do a pilot, I think that's critical for a lot of technologies. The majority of customers for our products or even my colleagues' prefer to have a case study or someone who has bought their product and tested it in their local market rather than having that done in a Toronto, Halifax or Vancouver. It doesn't carry as much weight. Everyone wants to know if you've done it in Illinois or Brazil, and so on and so forth. I think that's a big gap. That's missing.
The other one is in terms of financing or funding as you move towards profitability. I think most of EDC and our venture capital, whether they're government-backed or independent, have a tendency to try to want to deal, so we'd rarely invest in companies that have reached a valuation of $50 million-plus. We are one of the few companies that see, from a Canadian perspective, that there are not enough folks willing to bet on our own companies' growth because our valuation has gone up.
It's very much on start-up, not on scale-up. There we look at financing from other investors, which generally means that over time we will stop being a CCPC. I think that's something we should focus on. How do you ensure that there are more companies that continue to be CCPCs, that continue to apply for IP in Canada and are as Canadian as possible?
The other attribute I'd say that can be improved on is MOUs. Trade relationships are critical. As my colleague said, with buy America and buy Europe, how do we continue as a trading nation be in those discussions and help companies? There's also the fact that, in most of our agreements, we have a reliance on joint research and development. I think we should be cautious in pushing that. As a private entity, I would like to do customization of research to sell my product into a market of choice. I do not want to be beholden to doing research with a third party if there's an agreement or funding attached to that. I think uncoupling some of that would help us move into markets faster.
One of the other things I would also urge the committee to look at is that the goal of the Paris accord is a good one, but if we are to drive clean-tech companies abroad, I would rather that, as a nation, we would have objectives and goals that are audacious. An example of that would be that some of our provinces were chasing solar manufacturing or renewable manufacturing about a decade ago, 15 years after Germany had defined it. Germany defined it because they had an objective or a goal well before anybody else did, and by virtue of that, entrepreneurs came to that segment.
The U.K. and France, for example, have said they will not have a single combustion vehicle on their road by 2050. It's an audacious goal. What it means is that they're starting to think about what new industries have to be born to serve such a market if they're serious about that goal. I would urge Canadians and Canada to have an objective that we're driving towards.
I shall not talk more about buy America, it is of concern for us, especially with cybersecurity and security as an issue as well. I think it was covered by some of my colleagues. Really, what I would ask is to rethink some of our government funding and protocols to play more holistic role in terms of enhancing our growth in exports and paying taxes to Canada and employment in Canada.
Thank you.