By Ishpreet Khanuja
It is easy to think that a founder’s journey begins with a great solution. An entrepreneur has a novel, unique answer to a popular enough question, and then embarks on a journey to make that answer available to the masses. But what happens when a researcher sets out on that path — someone who thinks asking the right questions is just as important as finding the answers?
In 2023, a team of engineering students at the University of Toronto founded Serenity Power with the mission to create compact and sustainable power solutions for grid resilience using a new fuel cell design. Yifei Yan, Yvonne Liu and Aleisha Cerny, Cofounders of Serenity Power are on a mission to accelerate clean energy transition.
In our recent conversation with CEO Aleisha Cerny, she shares how her team’s inclination to sit with complexity and follow lines of inquiry beyond what was required began long before their path to entrepreneurship.
Her inspiring story, from engineering student to budding founder, offered valuable insights on how deeply technical builders often arrive at entrepreneurship gradually, carrying their questions with them until action becomes unavoidable.
The Origin Story
Cerny’s interest in clean technology began during her engineering studies, where she was fascinated by the idea that math, science, and engineering could be applied to climate action in practical ways. Her interest later sharpened during a research internship in Germany, where she joined a hydrogen and fuel cell division at a solar research institute.
Seeing fuel cells used innovatively on campus, through hydrogen-powered vehicles and fueling stations that produced water as their only byproduct, reframed her understanding of clean energy beyond theory, within real systems and with real constraints.
In 2021, Cerny began her master’s degree at the University of Toronto, where she encountered fuel cell technology again in the classroom. The course introduced her to solid oxide fuel cells and their ability to operate on multiple fuels, including natural gas and hydrogen. To Cerny, the technology seemed to offer a unique way to reduce emissions without waiting for a fully built hydrogen economy.
It was also through this course that she met Liu, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, initially through Zoom lectures and later through shared lab space. They were the students who stayed after class to ask questions, who went to teaching assistants with exam problems, who compared notes on research directions. Over time, those conversations extended beyond coursework.
Stepping Stones
Shortly after graduating, Cerny joined Yvonne and Yifei Yan (Chief Technology Officer) in an incubator at the University of Toronto. Their desire to work on fuel cells in a way that could make a tangible difference led them to design a fuel cell solution for Class 8 trucks, motivated by the environmental and health costs of diesel-powered freight. They developed a business plan and worked through early technical assumptions, even reaching the milestone of signing an NDA with Volvo in Sweden to explore a potential study.
Confident in the direction, they began fundraising, reaching out to roughly a thousand investors and securing close to 70 callbacks. “We heard a lot of ‘no’s early on, often just from reviewing the deck,” shared Cerny. “We learned that because transportation carries lower margins and much longer timelines, commercialization can take close to ten years, and many investors are working within five-to-seven-year funding cycles.”
By November 2024, the team started to sense a pivot on the horizon for Serenity.
Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
Their outreach led to an exciting invitation from one of the investors they had contacted, who encouraged the team to spend time in a New York-based hard-tech incubator. Over the coming months, Cerny and her co-founder spoke with dozens of organizations across mining, construction, oil and gas, healthcare and media. They asked important questions on how power was currently generated, where diesel was still relied upon and what pressures companies were facing around emissions and operating costs.
Through these brainstorming sessions, oil and gas started to emerge as a consistent theme over time. Many operations were remote and off-grid, diesel generators were common, and monitoring and sensing infrastructure required constant power. At the same time, companies were under increasing pressure to reduce emissions, particularly methane.
The team also looked at their own assumptions with a more critical perspective. Building mobility required power outputs in the hundreds of kilowatts and deep integration expertise they did not yet have. Power generation allowed them to start smaller, so they could design systems around 100 watts and deploy them, learning from field data and working toward larger units over time.
Shifting Conversations
Through these energy-focused accelerators and programs, the team connected directly with companies such as CNRL and TC Energy, which selected Serenity to participate in corporate cohorts that allowed the team to enter discussions grounded in operational realities rather than speculation.
In July, Cerny got the opportunity to present at Startupfest with sponsorship support. She pitched across four to five competitions, advancing repeatedly. She shares, “I was pitching back-to-back and moving straight into Q&A each time. I remember looking out at the audience. I was nervous, but people were engaged. They weren’t on their phones. That was the moment I felt that something was resonating.”
The Cost of Commitment
Standing on stage, she realized she was no longer operating as a student or researcher, no longer just on a quest for potential answers but responsible for spearheading the direction of a company. A reframing of identity for a founder comes with a sense of purpose, and as many founders will tell you, also with a unique blend of isolation, sacrifices and uncertainty.
She reflects, “Even when you are surrounded by family or friends, it can be hard to explain what’s actually going on. Much of it isn’t something people can relate to, so you don’t always talk about it. Over time, that can make the journey feel more isolating, simply because it is such a specific experience.” Amidst moving provinces and leaving behind the structure of academic life, what helped Cerny was being part of incubators and accelerators alongside other founders. Shared experiences shortened the learning curve and made the challenges feel less singular.
This guidance can be instrumental in setting realistic expectations for those new to build a hard-tech company at an early stage. Investor diligence often stretches over months, with technical deep dives that end without commitments. Questions around timelines to revenue can feel disconnected from the realities of hardware development, even when two years to initial revenue is considered accelerated by industry standards.
These burdens, Cerny notes, are rarely visible from the outside, but softened in the presence of a community that knows how to build with passion.
Next on The Agenda
Today, the company has three pilot projects under discussion for 2026, including work with a small natural gas producer in Southern Ontario and partners in Alberta and Italy. The pilots focus on deploying smaller systems to gather data and validate performance in the field. As the pilots move closer to execution, the next step will be raising a seed round to support higher-volume production and the development of larger systems, informed by data from early deployments.
Cerny’s vision has also begun to shift toward a longer horizon, where the future of energy is rooted in access, continuity, and responsibility. She realizes the transition to new energy will not happen in isolation, but within communities, across geographies and through innovation within pre-existing systems.
Her conversations with remote and northern communities have been instrumental in informing her big picture perspective. In regions where access to electricity is tied to a single annual shipment of diesel, delays or disruptions can affect heating, water access and basic daily life. These realities shape how Cerny thinks about the role of Serenity Power’s technology within Canada. Compact, dual-fuel systems are not only a technical solution for her, but a way to improve resilience where grid access is limited, and infrastructure expansion is slow.
Serenity Power’s work is not fueled by a desire to disrupt for disruption’s sake. It asks the truly pertinent question of who energy systems are built for and who they leave behind. Shaped by a willingness to work within complexity, their values still insist that access, reliability and equity matter. For founders navigating capital-intensive industries, her story offers an almost rebellious form of innovation, rooted in the belief that meaningful disruption is measured by how widely its benefits are shared.
Like many early-stage founders navigating complex paths to scale, Serenity Power continues to work with experienced advisors through Altitude Accelerator’s Investor Readiness Program, refining their strategy and preparing for future fundraising. Applications to the Investor Readiness Program are currently open for founders building with intention and planning their next stage of growth. Learn more here.
