Top 25 Spotlight – Ontoly

Financing the Foundation: Decarbonizing the Built World

Buildings produce roughly 40% of global emissions — and they’re locked out of the carbon market. Participating is time-intensive: legacy providers pile friction onto owners. It’s error-prone: mega-project aggregation and modeled guesses erode trust. And post-greenwashing, buyers demand proof from a market that stays stubbornly opaque.

Here’s the irony Ontoly is built on: buildings are the most provable carbon asset type. Every building meters its own performance — utility bills are audited, measured data. Nobody built the infrastructure to use it, so the value simply strands. A single hospital retrofit in Guelph, Ontario — $11.5M of HVAC equipment cutting 3,000 tonnes a year — represents $3M in carbon revenue over a ten-year crediting period. Until Ontoly, that money evaporated.

And delay compounds: New York City alone has $4.5B in building-emissions fines coming for 50,000 large properties, construction costs escalate 4–5% a year, and insurance premiums in high-climate-risk regions are growing at double digits. The retrofit wave is coming either way. Ontoly makes it pay.

The Proof is in the Building

What they’ve done: Buildings have been shut out of carbon markets for three reasons: the paperwork is overwhelming, the credits are based on modeled estimates, and buyers have no way to check what they’re actually purchasing. Ontoly built its platform around fixing all three. Owners just submit their utility data — Ontoly handles the calculations and issuance, then hires the third-party verifier and finds a buyer. The credits themselves come from real metered performance before and after a retrofit, not estimates, and each one traces back to a specific building and the equipment installed in it.

The Building Emissions Reduction Standard (BERS™), a 400-page certification program, was published in June 2025 and is now under review by the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market — a process that takes about two years, which means any would-be competitor is two years behind. The software launched in March 2026. Thirteen buildings are already onboarded, New York State has signed a paid 25-building pilot through NYSERDA, and BMO has signed a Letter of Intent to purchase Ontoly-certified credits. There’s a detail in that last one worth pausing on: BMO also financed the $11.5M hospital retrofit that Ontoly uses as its flagship example. The bank that paid for the project wants to buy the credits it produces.

Why NVBC: Competing in the 2026 New Ventures BC Competition, presented by Innovate BC, has pushed Ontoly to strip away highly complex carbon market jargon and sharpen their value proposition for generalist investors and stakeholders. Reaching the Top 25 has provided invaluable credibility, opening doors to advisors, institutional connections, and peer founders across the province’s cleantech community.

Up Next: The seed round scales both sides of the marketplace — and on the demand side, Ontoly’s strategy is distribution through partners rather than one-at-a-time enterprise sales. Three channels are already in motion:

Buyer platforms. A partnership with Cloverly and Patch — initiated this year — plugs Ontoly’s supply directly into the largest carbon-credit buyer networks in the world, putting building-level credits in front of thousands of corporate purchasers without Ontoly knocking on a single door.

Brokers and traders. Relationships with Marex and ACT Group, plus referral flows from partners like Voltus, connect certified credits to institutional desks that already move volume for compliance-adjacent and net-zero buyers.

Direct Sales to Buyers with skin in the game. The most distinctive channel: lenders and certifiers who already touch the retrofit. BMO’s Letter of Intent is the template — the bank financing a retrofit becomes the natural buyer of its credits — and alignment with green building certifications (LEED v5, the Zero Carbon Building Standard) makes Ontoly credits the monetization layer for buildings already pursuing certification.

Meanwhile we are scaling the supply-side:

Engineering firms channels: The highest-velocity channel, and the one already converting: 13 firms in active conversation — MCW, Prism Engineering, AME Consulting, J.L. Richards, Bilmar — with demos booked at Toromont and CIMCO and a meeting booked with PwC. Engineering firms are converting at 12.7% contact-to-meeting, four to five times the rate of direct real-estate outreach. The logic is simple: these firms sell retrofits for a living, and carbon revenue helps them close bigger projects — every firm brings Ontoly buildings in batches, not one at a time.

ESG data platforms partnerships:  Real estate ESG data firms sit on top of the exact utility data Ontoly’s certification runs on — with some $3 trillion in assets reporting through their platforms. A partnership in development with Measurabl points at the model: the data is already flowing; Ontoly becomes the monetization layer that turns a compliance reporting cost into a revenue stream, offered to thousands of buildings through a platform they already use.

Direct sales to portfolio owners: The New York State pilot is the beachhead — NYSERDA onboarding 25 buildings in a single contract proves the portfolio motion: one relationship, dozens of buildings. The direct pipeline follows the same shape: 13 buildings live with Ottawa Community Housing and Efficiency Capital, first meetings held with CT REIT and booked with RioCan, and 60+ introductory calls spanning Hines, URBs, and California State. One owner with hundreds of buildings is the hockey stick — and building performance standards in 25+ cities keep pushing them through the door.

Overcoming the Inertia of the Built World

For fifteen years, the carbon market ran on easy money: non-profit registries — not business-savvy, not tech-savvy — selling low-quality credits with no scrutiny. In 2025, roughly 150 greenwashing lawsuits forced the correction. Buyers stopped paying for stories and started paying premiums for verified quality — Isometric proved it in carbon removals.

The registry is the glue the entire market builds on, and disrupting it is the opportunity. Nobody had done it for buildings — partly because it takes standard-authoring expertise almost nobody has. Ontoly’s founder wrote those rules from the inside, then anchored every credit to verifiable utility data. You can’t greenwash a meter reading. The ambition from here is stated plainly in the company’s final pitch slide: the world’s carbon platform for real estate.