energy transition

Announcing Our Investment in FUTURi Power: The Last Dumb Box in Our Home Gets a Brain

For nearly 70 years, the home electrical panel has looked the same. Meanwhile, the home itself is transforming: solar on the roof, batteries in the garage, heat pumps, EVs in the driveway, and smart appliances and devices everywhere.

And yet, the panel? Still the same. It is the last dumb box left, and FUTURi is fixing that with deep tech.

FUTURi’s Energy Processor

FUTURi Power, founded by Dr. Martin Ordonez (UBC Professor, Kaiser Chair at UBC, and recipient of the King Charles III Coronation Medal for leadership in clean energy innovation), reimagines the panel as the Energy Processor, a programmable energy computer that finally gives the home’s electrical system a brain. It is designed as a like-for-like replacement for the traditional panel that is future-proof and intelligently measures and coordinates loads, avoids peaks, and manages energy use at the edge.

Why This Matters

Homes are no longer passive energy consumers. They are dynamic nodes in the grid. By making the panel intelligent, FUTURi enables:

For homeowners: Achieve a 100% electric home without costly service upgrades. A smarter, more resilient, and efficient energy ecosystem.
For utilities: Demand peaks flattened, demand response (DR) programs and distributed energy resources (DERs) integrated, deferring costly capital expenditures.
For builders and communities: Intelligent electrification helps accelerate the deployment of built infrastructure without overloading the grid.

This is why FUTURi and utilities are already collaborating on projects to evaluate how Energy Processors can strengthen the grid and benefit customers.

Our Perspective

As Dr. Martin Ordonez, Founder and CEO of FUTURi Power, puts it: “Panels used to be passive. The Energy Processor is active, safe, and software-defined. It gives homes and grids a common language.”
At TSF, Smart Energy is one of our five focus areas. Our thesis is simple: the cost of intelligence is collapsing, and the biggest opportunities lie where software and hardware come together to reshape behaviour.

FUTURi is exactly that blueprint for intelligent electrification: deep-tech power electronics plus intelligent control. That combination turns a 70-year-old box into the brain of the modern home. Dr. Ordonez and his team are globally recognized experts in electrification who are translating decades of pioneering research into transformative commercial solutions.

And this is just the beginning. There is so much more the company can do to make electricity truly intelligent. FUTURi has a bright future ahead (pun fully intended).

Five Areas Shaping the Next Frontier

The cost of intelligence is dropping at an unprecedented rate. Just as the drop in the cost of computing unlocked the PC era and the drop in the cost of connectivity enabled the internet era, falling costs today are driving explosive demand for AI adoption. That demand creates opportunity on the supply side too, in the infrastructure, energy, and technologies needed to support and scale this shift.

In our Thesis 3.0, we highlighted how this AI-driven platform shift will reshape behaviour at massive scale. But identifying the how also means knowing where to look.

Every era of technology has a set of areas where breakthroughs cluster, where infrastructure, capital, and talent converge to create the conditions for outsized returns. For the age of intelligent systems, we see five such areas, each distinct but deeply interconnected.

1. Vertical AI Platforms

After large language models, the next wave of value creation will come from Vertical AI Platforms that combine proprietary data, hard-to-replicate models, and orchestration layers designed for complex and large-scale needs.

Built on unique datasets, workflows, and algorithms that are difficult to imitate, these platforms create proprietary intelligence layers that are increasingly agentic. They can actively make decisions, initiate actions, and shape workflows. This makes them both defensible and transformative, even when part of the foundation rests on commodity models.

This shift from passive tools to active participants marks a profound change in how entire sectors operate.

2. Physical AI

The past two decades of digital transformation mostly played out behind screens. The next era brings AI into the physical world.

Physical AI spans autonomous devices, robotics, and AI-powered equipment that can perceive, act, and adapt in real environments. From warehouse automation to industrial robotics to autonomous mobility, this is where algorithms leave the lab and step into society.

We are still early in this curve. Just as industrial machinery transformed factories in the nineteenth century, Physical AI will reshape industries that rely on labour-intensive, precision-demanding, or hazardous work.

The companies that succeed will combine world-class AI models with robust hardware integration and build the trust that humans place in systems operating alongside them every day.

3. AI Infrastructure

Every transformative technology wave has required new infrastructure that is robust, reliable, and efficient. For AI, this means going beyond raw compute to ensure systems that are secure, safe, and trustworthy at scale.

We need security, safety, efficiency, and trustworthiness as first-class priorities. That means building the tools, frameworks, and protocols that make AI more energy efficient, explainable, and interoperable.

The infrastructure layer determines not only who can build AI, but who can trust it. And trust is ultimately what drives adoption.

4. Advanced Computing Hardware

Every computing revolution has been powered by a revolution in hardware. Just as the transistor enabled mainframes and the microprocessor ushered in personal computing, the next era will be defined by breakthroughs in semiconductors and specialized architectures.

From custom chips to new communication fabrics, hardware is what makes new classes of AI and computation possible, both in the cloud and on the edge. But it is not only about raw compute power. The winners will also tackle energy efficiency, latency, and connectivity, areas that become bottlenecks as models scale.

As Moore’s Law hits its limit, we are entering an age of architectural innovation with neuromorphic computing, photonics, quantum computing, and other advances. Much like the steam engine once unlocked new industries, these architectures will redefine what is computationally possible. This is deep tech meeting industrial adoption, and those who can scale it will capture immense value.

5. Smart Energy

Every technological leap has demanded a new energy paradigm. The electrification era was powered by the grid. Today, AI and computing are demanding unprecedented amounts of energy, and the grid as it exists cannot sustain this future.

This is why smart energy is not peripheral, but central. From new energy sources to intelligent distribution networks, the way we generate, store, and allocate energy is being reimagined. The idea of programmable energy, where supply and demand adapt dynamically using AI, will become as fundamental to the AI era as packet switching was to the internet.

Here, deep engineering meets societal need. Without resilient and efficient energy, AI progress stalls. With it, the future scales.

Shaping What Comes Next

The drop in the cost of intelligence is driving demand at a scale we have never seen before. That demand creates opportunity on the supply side too, in the platforms, hardware, energy, physical systems, and infrastructure that make this future possible.

The five areas — Vertical AI Platforms, Physical AI, AI Infrastructure, Advanced Computing Hardware, and Smart Energy — represent the biggest opportunities of this era. They are not isolated. They form an interconnected landscape where advances in one accelerate breakthroughs in the others.

We are domain experts in these five areas. The TSF team brings technical, product and commercialization expertise that helps founders build and scale in precisely these spaces. We are uniquely qualified to do so.

At Two Small Fish, this is the canvas for the next generation of 100x companies. We are excited to partner with the founders building in these areas globally, those who not only see the future, but are already shaping it.

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This blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to copy, redistribute, remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given.

Only Optionality Can Make Canada Strong and Free

The tariffs are coming. We all know this isn’t really about fentanyl—only 19 kg of the U.S.’s supply comes from Canada, while close to 10,000 kg was seized at the U.S. border.

Even if we solved this tiny issue, Trump would find something else—maybe he’d complain that the snow in NYC is due to cold air from Canada and slap us with another tariff.

Trump’s playbook is simple: weaponize everything at his disposal to get what he wants.

He’s imposing tariffs on everything from us. We can debate whether to slap tariffs on orange juice or hair dryers in response, but that won’t materially change the outcome. How we react now is just noise—he holds all the leverage anyway. Canada will suffer in the short term, no matter what.

But we shouldn’t let a crisis go to waste. This is a golden opportunity to fix systemic issues that were previously near impossible to address—like interprovincial trade barriers. Yet even fixing that won’t solve the root problem.

Stepping back, the real issue is one of the first principles of leadership: Optionality.

Having alternatives always provides leverage. This principle applies broadly—not just to negotiations, but also to fundraising, supplier relationships, operations, company survival, M&A, and beyond—including leading a country.

Trump understands leverage better than most. This isn’t just about negotiation—even if we reach a deal this time, any agreement with him isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.

As a country, we are far too dependent on the U.S., and Trump knows it. Only by addressing our lack of optionality can we deal with him—and future U.S. presidents—on equal footing.

There is no quick fix. Only a new, decisive, visionary Prime Minister can guide Canada out of this mess.

The only way forward is to leverage what we do best—energy, natural resources, AI, and more—to create true optionality. As the world shifts toward intangible assets, ironically, our proximity to the U.S. is becoming less of a hindrance to diversification.

We must control our own destiny. We cannot allow any single country—U.S. or otherwise—to hold us hostage.

Only optionality can make Canada strong and free.

P.S. This blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to copy, redistribute, remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given.

Powerwall 3 and Smart Energy

Those who know me well would tell you I am a pretty boring person. I don’t have many hobbies, but one thing I do love is gadgets. For instance, I’m a big fan of DIY home automation. Practically every electronic device in my house is voice-controlled, automated, and Wi-Fi-connected—if it can be, it probably is. Here’s a fun example:

I love robots doing things for me because, frankly, I’m too busy.

At this rate, I might run out of IP addresses! Sure, I could change my network’s subnet to enable more, but every time I tinker with my setup, I have to invest time getting everything right again—something I don’t have in abundance. Anyway, I digress.

One gadget I’ve wanted for years but hesitated to get is a home energy storage and backup system, like Tesla’s Powerwall. The Powerwall 2 has been around since 2016, but for years, the Powerwall 3 was “just around the corner,” with rumours of its launch “next month” seemingly every month. I didn’t want to invest in a device I planned to use for a decade only for it to become obsolete right after I bought it.

Finally, the wait is over. Powerwall 3 became available earlier this year, and I’m glad I waited. Its specs—peak power, continuous power, and efficiency—are significantly upgraded from Powerwall 2. That said, I was a little disappointed that its battery capacity remained unchanged.

I’m told this was the first Powerwall 3 installation in Canada, which is pretty exciting! It’s a beautiful piece of technology, though I don’t see much of it since it’s tucked away in the basement. Paired with solar panels, I hope to “off the grid” as much as possible.

As good as the Powerwall 3 is, it’s only part of the solution. While it handles storage and backup very well, it doesn’t provide fine-grained energy monitoring, let alone control. To address this, I also installed a Sense energy monitor. This device, connected to the electrical panel, collects real-time data from electrical currents to identify unique energy signatures for every appliance and device in the home. It’s a hack, a retrofit solution and imperfect, but it’s probably the best option for someone like me, who is entrenched in the Tesla ecosystem.

The energy space hasn’t changed much in the past half-century. Take the electric panel, for example—it’s still essentially the same analog system I remember from my childhood. However, with the rapid acceleration of the energy transition, smarter energy systems are becoming critical as hardware and software converge to enable new possibilities.

A big thanks to James and Dave from the Borealis Clean Energy team for helping me with this project
—and for arriving in style with Canada’s first Cybertruck. The project has so many moving parts. Their expertise made this journey much smoother.