Founder Spotlight

We share our members’ achievements; the challenges they overcame, and the advice they want women entrepreneurs everywhere to know.

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Meet Natasha Kostenuk, Founder and CEO of Ayrton Energy, which is developing a new off-grid hydrogen-powered electric vehicle charging and energy storage system.

Learn about how Kostenuk’s decades of experience in the oil and gas sector, finding new and novel applications for technologies, along with her experience supporting early-stage tech startups, led her to embark on her own entrepreneurial journey. 

Read on for our Founder Spotlight interview with Natasha.

Meet Natasha Kostenuk, Founder and CEO of Ayrton Energy, which is developing a new off-grid hydrogen-powered electric vehicle charging and energy storage system. Learn about how Kostenuk’s decades of experience in the oil and gas sector, finding new and novel applications for technologies, along with her experience supporting early stage tech startups, led her to embark on her own entrepreneurial journey. 

Tell us about your company, Ayrton Energy, and what motivated you to found it?

It came to me during a conversation with another mom from my son’s baseball team last summer. She was complaining that she couldn’t charge her Tesla and run her air conditioner at home at the same time. And I just thought, that’s ridiculous—that doesn’t seem like it’s a real problem. As an engineer, I decided to do some research and I discovered she was right. Sometimes there isn’t enough electrical capacity at people’s homes, and upgrades can cost tens of thousands of dollars. The infrastructure is old and we keep putting pressure on the grid, so we add power plants to the grid and increase overall capacity, but 80 percent of the infrastructure was built before 2000 and so it’s not built for the level of electrification we need today. It got me thinking about a solution that could be off-grid, totally separate. I founded Ayrton Energy in December 2021 and since then we’ve been developing hydrogen-powered EV charging and energy storage systems. 

What’s your career and employment background?

I’m a mechanical engineer by training and I worked in the oil and gas sector, specifically in energy services, for 19 years, with a variety of roles. I’ve worked in field operations, lab operations, I’ve worked abroad in Russia, I’ve done tech sales, and towards the end of my 19 years, I was in business development doing partnerships and licensing and distribution agreements. That gave me an eye-opening view of how different technologies can be used in different ways across industries and to solve problems that they maybe weren’t initially designed for. After that, I left the oil and gas sector and began working with early-stage tech companies, and I learned a lot about starting a business. Eventually, I had my own idea and started my own company.

What was the transition from your career to becoming a founder like for you?

It’s funny because I never thought about it as a pivot; it felt like baby steps moving in this direction and before I knew it I was facing a totally new way. I fell into the business side of things when I was still in oil and gas, finding uses and technologies for things that were not quite oil and gas related. When I started consulting for early stage tech companies, I just dove into the ecosystem and started volunteering and meeting as many different groups and organizations as I could. That helped me broaden my network, and once my network grew beyond oil and gas it opened up opportunities for me to continue to follow that path. It’s been about a three or four year journey but it felt like it happened with baby steps along the way. 

Networks are so important for entrepreneurs. How did expanding yours impact your experience?

That’s actually how I found my company co-founder. I was talking with a few people I trusted about my idea, really trying to get them to push me to find the holes. And in a meeting with one of my contacts, someone who was highly networked in the ecosystem, she said, ‘There’s someone you should meet who is working in this space.’ That’s how I was introduced to my co-founder, who has a PhD in chemistry and did her PhD project on fuel cells—so she has a high level of expertise and really knows the tech space. She’s now our Chief Technology Officer. So networks are so important and so valuable.

What stage is your company at now, and what comes next?

We’re still in the early stages. We spent the last year doing a lot of research, calculations and simulations to really figure out how we want to solve these problems. We’ve also started to build a network of strategic partners because we want to de-risk our pathway and speed our path to market by partnering with people who have technology we can integrate into our own technology. We're raising a million dollars and we’re moving into a lab space here in Calgary, we’re going to hire additional staff and get the equipment we need to build our prototype.. So that is the next phase—building and validating the components we’ve been working on. We’re looking to begin piloting in 2024 and turn commercial in 2025. 

Has there been anything that has surprised you as an entrepreneur?

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the number of people that will give me their time, because time is so valuable. I’d always thought, I can’t pay someone for this advice so I shouldn’t ask for help, but I’ve been so surprised at how many people are willing to help and give their time without being paid, which is incredible. Aside from that, I knew that this was going to be a hard journey, but it’s so much harder than I could have possibly known. Everyone says it’s going to be a roller coaster—you hear that so often—and it’s so true. You can’t really understand what it’s like until you’ve lived it. So you just need to be able to wake up every day knowing why you're doing what you're doing and stay focused on trying to do that.