Top 25 Spotlight – Syris

Bringing Institutional Knowledge to the Frontline

Industrial processing plants, metallurgy facilities, and heavy manufacturing sites collect astronomical amounts of operational data every single second. Yet, when a critical choice must be made on the plant floor at 3:00 a.m., the engineers responsible for safety and millions of dollars in production are often left fighting a fragmented battle. The insights they need to prevent costly downtime are scattered across disconnected systems, rigid dashboards, isolated legacy reports, and the unwritten intuition of senior operators who will eventually retire.

Syris, a Vancouver-based deeptech startup, is tackling this problem head-on by bridging the costly chasm between raw industrial data and human execution. Instead of forcing busy engineers to manually piece together technical puzzles under intense pressure, Syris centralizes and translates existing operational data into actionable, real-time decision support. By putting hard-won plant knowledge directly into the hands of the frontline engineers running the floor, the platform ensures that complex operational choices are faster, data-backed, and entirely repeatable.

This operational gap frequently translates into massive financial waste. According to industrial data published by Deloitte, unplanned downtime and unexpected process disruptions drain an estimated $50 billion annually across industrial sectors. These systemic failures leave continuous-processing operations highly vulnerable to millions of dollars in lost throughput, missed growth targets, and heavily inflated emergency maintenance labor. For heavy industry environments, a minor delay in interpreting a weak signal can stall critical production machinery for days, disrupting high-stakes supply chains and eating directly into margins.

Rather than trying to replace human judgment with a rigid black box, Syris respects and elevates the expertise of the frontline engineer. It transforms an overwhelming sea of industrial metrics into a clear, trustworthy competitive edge for continuous process operations.

Unlocking Multi-Million Dollar Operational Value

What They’ve Done: Syris has successfully translated advanced process-control research into strong market traction. After moving from customer discovery into industrial validation, the startup developed its flagship platform, SyrisOne, and secured a paid engagement with a Tier-1 operator that actively sought out the company to solve their operational pain. Syris is also finalizing a commercial contract with a major mine producer. In initial validation against smelter data, SyrisOne flagged avoidable process losses representing approximately $4 million in potential annual value at a single site.

Why NVBC: Advancing through the 2026 New Ventures BC Competition, presented by Innovate BC, has pushed the leadership team to translate their complex science into a clear business case. The competition has forced the founders to look beyond technical formulas and articulate their value proposition, path to adoption, and market entry points in a way that is concrete, commercially grounded, and understandable to outside investors.

Up Next: The next 12 months are focused entirely on moving from early validation to trusted, permanent field deployment. The team is dedicated to deepening its collaborative work with industrial partners, converting early pilots into full enterprise rollouts, and securing their first multi-site commercial agreement. To fuel this expansion, Syris is building its funding foundation and intentionally scaling its team around individuals who possess deep process-control, industrial, and software engineering expertise.

The Strategic Friction Rule

Along their journey to building Syris, the founders uncovered a hard, counterintuitive lesson that contradicts standard early-stage startup advice: the necessity of adding strategic friction before trying to remove it.

For many software companies, the initial instinct is to keep the top of the sales funnel as wide as possible, making it incredibly easy for any prospect to say yes to a shallow pilot. In heavy industry, however, the Syris team quickly realized that depth beats breadth. Industrial plants are incredibly complex, high-risk environments where loose commitments yield zero real product feedback.

By shifting their strategy to focus strictly on industrial partners who have urgent, painful problems and are willing to grant deep access to their actual operating environments, Syris bypassed shallow traction. Saying no to superficial interest is uncomfortable for an early-stage company, but the founders discovered that this intentional friction is exactly how you stress-test software against real-world constraints. It ensures that the product being built is something a plant team can’t easily live without later.