CleanDesign Secures $20M Growth Investment to Expand Hybrid Energy Management Systems in Industrial Markets
Toronto keeps it quiet until it doesn’t. Then a company like CleanDesign steps in and lets the numbers do the talking. A $20M growth investment, Edison Partners on the wire, and suddenly the hum from drilling sites and mines sounds a lot more like momentum than background noise.
Mark Lerohl has been around capital long enough to know money chases momentum, not promises. That shows up in how CleanDesign was built. From its roots as CleanDesign Income Corporation to the 2023 evolution into CleanDesign Inc., this wasn’t a rebrand for aesthetics. It was a tightening of identity. Hybrid Energy Management Systems, trailer-sized, field-ready, built to sit beside diesel generators and politely make them smarter, leaner, and a little less wasteful. Up to 20% less fuel and emissions, according to company-reported performance. In industries where every gallon and every uptime minute matters, that is not a rounding error.
CTO Pritesh Patel is steering the tech that makes those gains real, stitching together batteries, controls, and software that can think in real time while the ground shakes and the weather disagrees. COO Kevin McIntyre keeps operations aligned with reality, not slide decks. CFO Greg Kent watches the numbers like they owe him money. Maureen Darrigo has been there since the beginning, which tells you this isn’t a late-night idea that got lucky. It is repetition, iteration, and a refusal to ship anything that cannot survive a job site.
Edison Partners did not wander into this one. Growth equity shows up when a company proves it can turn complexity into a repeatable system. CleanDesign did that by meeting oil and gas and mining where they are, not where a keynote wishes they were. No lectures, just better power management that plugs into what already exists. That is how adoption actually happens.
CleanDesign is not trying to replace the industrial backbone overnight. It is teaching it new habits. Battery plus generator, software plus steel, efficiency that compounds across fleets and sites. You do not need a revolution when you can engineer a steady advantage.
The Honourable Candice Bergen joining the board adds a different kind of signal. Policy, industry, and capital do not always speak the same language. Having someone who can translate matters when you are operating in sectors where regulation, infrastructure, and economics are constantly negotiating.
The takeaway is simple, even if the system is not. If you can reduce cost and emissions without asking operators to gamble their uptime, you earn your seat. CleanDesign is earning it one deployment at a time, turning energy management into something that actually manages energy, not just reports on it.
