Pratik Ghoshal considers himself a serial entrepreneur. Someone who shifts his focus from one venture to another in response to the world around him. Ghoshal is the founder and CEO of the startup ConnectX, a platform that uses existing infrastructure to collect data and perform advanced, AI-powered analytics to provide predictions for energy demand and supply. This is done in an effort to help distribute energy efficiently, while providing sustainable cost savings.
In other words, Ghoshal and ConnectX are urgently focused on modernizing Canada’s aging electrical grid to help keep electricity costs sustainably low using technology, as opposed to replacing hardware (like wires) or building new infrastructure (like power plants).
In April, ConnectX was named the winner of the StartupTNT 2024 Cleantech Investment Summit and awarded more than $200,000 of equity investment from Startup TNT angel investors and its venture capital fund, TNT Capital. Those funds will help Ghoshal expand his team in early 2025.
“It’s very meaningful, and also at a point in time when Alberta, and especially Calgary, is kind of setting out to be the global tech hub,” says Ghoshal. “And it’s happening in the clean tech space so it was extremely meaningful for us.”
Currently, “the grid” in Canada — a network of networks delivering electricity from where it’s generated to homes, businesses and communities — is more than 100 years old and made up of 166,000 kilometers of high voltage transmission lines (enough to wrap the Earth more than four times). According to Electricity Canada, the need for clean power is expected to triple in demand by 2050, which will further slow down a system that has had hundreds of blackouts in the past three years alone.
“If we don’t do anything, really immediately, we will have a pretty dark future,” says Ghoshal. “And in the literal sense we’ll have a dark future.”