Having won $100,000-plus in New Brunswick’s breakthru competition, Infralytics CEO Ethan MacLeod has his sights on developing his hardware and launching some pilot projects to help his young company grow.

At a sold-out event in Fredericton last week, Infralytics captured the first prize at breakthru, which was hosted by the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation. The company will receive a $100,000 investment from NBIF for winning the competition, and it also took home $2,500 for the Viewers’ Choice Award.

Infralytics is the product of eight years of research and development by MacLeod, who is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of New Brunswick.

“Infralytics turns bridges into scales,” said MacLeod in an interview. “We place small sensors under a bridge so they can weigh the trucks going over it. No lane closures. No interruptions.

“We also look at how the bridge performs and hopefully extend the life of our aging infrastructure.”

MacLeod’s work on this project began when he was a summer student employed by the New Brunswick Department of Transportation. He was asked to assess the weight of trucks passing over a truss bridge southeast of Fredericton.

Placing sensors under the bridge, he was able to come up with his own system of weighing the trucks that passed over it. The ease of installation and access to data impressed his bosses, and MacLeod has spent the past eight years refining the product.

MacLeod and the transport department worked together in the intervening years testing, refining and validating the product. He also presented it at conferences to public- and private-sector owners of infrastructure, gaining interest from potential customers.

MacLeod said the market for the product is vast as there are 650,000 bridges in the U.S. and Canada, but only 2,000 weighing stations. Provincial and state governments might be natural customers for Infralytics and MacLeod also believes owners of public-private partnership projects could use the technology. As well as helping to maintain the condition of the structures, these infrastructure owners would also benefit from the data Infralytics generates.

With the technology validated, MacLeod decided to enter breakthru, a competition that had been popular in the last decade but faded away during the pandemic. The competition included several workshops and mentorship sessions, and MacLeod said he benefited greatly from these sessions as he’d never been exposed to the processes of entrepreneurship before.

“It’s kind of a hard muscle to train if you’re an academic because it’s a different set of questions you have to ask,” said MacLeod. “I think there are a lot of academics out there who may not realize that they have a million-dollar idea.”

With the competition over, MacLeod now has to develop the technology into a company, and he plans to spend the next few months building the product into something he can sell to customers.

“We really need to shrink it down into a simple turnkey package that really will help us scale,” he said. “So, the next big step is developing our own hardware and then lining up some pilot projects hopefully for late summer or early fall.”