When John Quimby and Kyle Hoar attended the Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge in Moncton to get out of school for the day, they couldn’t have known it would be the birth of a business venture.

The two 15-year-olds presented their science fair idea: to use the water going down the drain to generate energy. They won the Challenge—in the 18- to 35-year-old category.

Now both 16 and in Grade 11, Quimby and Hoar brought their idea to Vennture Garage, a New Brunswick-based initiative to help early-stage companies validate and build out their ideas.

Quimby and Hoar now call their company Drain Power, which uses water coming down the drain to create energy for household appliances, such as cell phones.

Quimby said he doesn’t know how much Drain Power will cost, but it will be much less than the existing energy-saving tools, such as solar panels, one of which costs around $4000.

“People keep on preaching the idea, we have to go green, we have to go green, we need to go green—but nobody can afford it,” Quimby said. “Why don’t we think of something that hasn’t been done yet, will be renewable energy that will make our world a greener place, have a brighter tomorrow?”

Robertson Developing Talent Pipeline

Dave Gallant, Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Vennture Garage, saw Quimby and Hoar present at the Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge last year. Drain Power and the physical prototype Quimby and Hoar brought with them amazed him.

Gallant encouraged the teens to apply to Vennture Garage’s 2015-16 cohort. Since May, when the two co-founders joined Vennture Garage, Drain Power went from a science project to a customer-validated business with interested investors.

“I don’t even get it!” Gallant said of Quimby and Hoar. “They have schematics. They’re true entrepreneurs, you can see it. They’re so driven.”

Vennture Garage started in August 2014 in Moncton. This June, a branch of Vennture Garage opened up in Saint John. Excluding the stats from this year’s Saint John Garage, 15 startups have formed at the space. The teams received over 500 hours of coaching and mentoring and conducted more than 500 customer discovery interviews.

The current Vennture Garages contain 13 startups.

Doug Robertson, President and CEO of Venn Centre, which supports Vennture Garage, said he began the Garage to help better prepare early-stage startups in New Brunswick for accelerators and create successful and sustainable business.

Five of the past Vennture Garage teams went through Propel ICT, which the regional accelerator for Atlantic Canada.

Robertson and Gallant want to see more young people like Quimby and Hoar creating business in the Maritimes so that they will stay in the region. The Maritimes have many unused entrepreneurial resources.

“People are doing nothing but complaining,” Quimby said. “Kyle and I are actually getting up and doing something about it…We need to stop treating young people like young people, they should give us a voice.”