Key takeaways
- PhyCo Technologies Inc. is our 2026 Shift Impact Grant recipient, chosen for a partnership-based approach that replaces a harmful material outright rather than asking for behaviour-change.
- Seven other shortlisted teams made this year's decision genuinely hard, and we're spotlighting them below.
- This year's theme, "Reimagining," is about backing people who build sustainability in from the start, retrofit it into industries that never accounted for it, or find value in what's already been thrown away.
- This grant exists at a time when sustainability conversations are losing airtime and funding, not because the work matters less.
- All seven shortlisted teams are already producing measurable environmental impact, not just promising it.
- Our judging process runs on a scored rubric, two independent reviewers per applicant, and outside sustainability experts.
- Applications for the 2027 Shift Impact Grant open next year. Sign up for Re:Earth to be the first to know.
We just wrapped the second annual Shift Impact Grant and this year's theme was "Reimagining." For us, that word means something broader than building in sustainability from day one, though some of this year's applicants did exactly that. It also meant retrofitting industries that never historically accounted for their environmental impact, or looking at something ordinary, like a heat pump or a used EV battery, and seeing potential nobody else built for.
That belief matters more right now, not less. Sustainability conversations are losing ground in the broader news cycle and funding for climate work has gotten harder to find. Shift, as a browser built inside the tech industry, is part of a sector with the reach to change that. This grant is one way that Redbrick and Shift try to put that reach to use: to keep funding and spotlighting people doing the work, even when the conversation around them goes quiet.
Introducing our 2026 recipient: PhyCo Technologies Inc.
We were thrilled to announce PhyCo Technologies Inc. as this year's Shift Impact Grant recipient. PhyCo Technologies Inc. is a female-founded marine biotech company making plastic from seaweed, tackling a problem most people never think about: plastic mulch film covers roughly 25 million acres of farmland globally and leaves behind millions of tons of soil contamination every year. Seaweed plastic already exists in bags, packaging, and bottles as a lower-carbon swap for petroleum plastic, and PhyCo is bringing that same idea to agriculture's mulch film problem. They're building in direct partnership with coastal farmers and Indigenous communities who supply the raw material, which shaped how we thought about their scalability and organizational capacity as much as the technology itself.
We chose PhyCo because their solution is structural: rather than asking farmers to change behaviour, it replaces the plastic mulch film they're already using with seaweed plastic that breaks down instead of building up. We're grateful to be even a small part of the future they're building. You can read their full story below:
Introducing PhyCo: our 2026 Shift Impact Grant recipient
Meet PhyCo Technologies, the seaweed-based plastics biotech turning seaweed into compostable alternatives to agricultural plastic. Our 2026 Impact Grant recipient.
Read MoreHow we choose
Every application goes through an eligibility screen, then a scored rubric covering community-centred impact, innovative use of technology, alignment with Shift's values, scalability, organizational capacity, and clarity, with bonus points for strong partnerships. Each shortlisted applicant is reviewed independently by two judges before the full panel comes together to land on a final decision.
Sustainability credibility is easy to claim and hard to earn, which is why we focussed on bringing together experts across industries. This year's panel included Joanna Buczkowska-McCumber and Shelley Voyer, both Managing Partners at W Venture; Jason Michaelwood, VP of Software Engineering at Vitamin Lab; Kip Pastor, CEO and founder of Pique Action; and Alana Mairs, Director of Brand Marketing at Shift, with Redbrick facilitating. With an engineer's eye on the technology, an investor's eye on the numbers, and a storyteller's eye on the narrative, a project has to hold up under all three.
Why we're highlighting the teams we didn't fund
Applications more than doubled this year, and choosing a single recipient was an extremely difficult decision. Seven other teams made it deep into our process this year, and every one of them is already creating real, measurable impact in their communities and industries.
Part of what "Reimagining" means to us is making sure meaningful work gets seen, so here they are, in no particular order, because they earned it.
The 2026 shortlist
1. Aquarry (Golden, CO, flagship project in Baie Verte, NL):
Founder and CEO Dr. Kate Murphy, a materials engineer with a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, built the techno-economic model herself, raised the early funding, and locked down the pilot site agreements before her technology ever left a spreadsheet. Her flagship project targets the Advocate mine in Baie Verte, Newfoundland, an asbestos mine abandoned for 30 years. Working with geospatial scientist Ankur Shah of PlanetSapling, she's turning that toxic site into a permanent carbon sink.
2. GreenGear Supply Company (Albertson, NY, manufacturing in Indianapolis):
Monika Dharia had the idea for a sustainable rain poncho as a Duke University sophomore in 2016. She kept it alive through years of environmental chemistry research and a stint at Bain & Company before finally going all in on GreenGear in 2022. Her sugarcane-based ponchos and bags, produced through a workforce-inclusion manufacturing partner in Indianapolis, now show up at Eagles games and NBA arenas.
3. Torus (West Windsor, NJ):
Torus started with four friends, Matthew Gao, Anthony Woo, David Chen, and Zikang Jiang, watching food waste pile up in their school's dining hall and deciding the real barrier to composting wasn't willingness, it was access. What began as a student project in late 2023 is now a registered nonprofit that has composted over 250,000 lbs of food waste for more than 1,000 households and businesses.
4. Dreamstill Technologies (makers of the app Sorty, Vancouver, BC):
Co-founders Khushi Khosla and Marcelle "Mars" Moreira started Dreamstill after finding 1,200 lbs of dumped clothing in a Vancouver alleyway and spending hundreds of hours by hand figuring out where each piece should go. That headache inspired Sorty, an app that tells anyone the best next life for a garment in seconds, now piloting in Metro Vancouver this winter.
5. Mapleview Energy (Collingwood, ON):
Nick Nesbitt spent years researching waste systems and circular economy infrastructure before founding Mapleview Energy, and has since been named one of The Peak's Emerging Leaders and a Waste360 Top 40 Under 40 honoree. He and a small engineering team, including alumni from Ford and GE, are giving retired EV batteries, still holding 70 to 80 percent of their capacity, a second life as affordable energy storage for businesses, farms, and remote sites.
6. Dawn Energy (London, ON):
CEO Tessa Peerless built Dawn Optimise to catch a problem hiding in plain sight, an estimated 65 percent of installed heat pumps run inefficiently today, quietly wasting the electricity they were meant to save. Her platform turns fleets of monitored, corrected heat pumps into a resource the power grid can actually call on.
7. Seafoam Materials (Vancouver, BC):
Co-founders Amy Yang and Chloe Doesburg are both architects, which means they've spent their careers watching exactly how much carbon a home's insulation quietly locks in before anyone's even switched on a light. Working with fractional chief scientist Dr. Minh Hai Tran, they built a seaweed-based insulation that drops straight into the same spot as mineral wool or fibreglass, no new tools or habits required, while cutting embodied carbon by roughly 69 percent.
Seven very different people, seven very different problems, and every one of them decided the answer was to build something instead of waiting for someone else to.
Thank you, and see you in 2027
To everyone who applied this year: thank you. The volume and quality of applications made this an extremely hard shortlist to narrow down, and that's a good problem to have. To our seven shortlisted teams specifically, thank you for the impact you're creating in your industries and communities every single day.
If you want to be the first to know when the 2027 Shift Impact Grant applications open, sign up for Shift’s Re:Earth newsletter at shift.com/impact-grant.
