A Saint John electric vehicle startup has received just over $400,000 from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency as it looks to scale production of its high-performance motors.

Victory Advanced Technologies sells powertrains that can be retrofitted to existing vehicles by third-party shops. It aims to differentiate its products by offering higher performance options for custom sports cars and motorsport applications, such as rallies, chief technical officer Isaac Barkhouse said in an interview Thursday.

Barkhouse, an electric vehicle industry veteran who spent three years as CTO of Fredericton’s Potential Motors, founded Victory with Steve Belyea and Greg Hemmings in 2021. The trio were inspired by Belyea’s difficulties electrifying a classic car he owned, as well as the challenges Hemmings encountered in finding an electric motor durable enough to be installed in his sailboat.

“You fell into one of two traps: either the powertrains weren’t high-performance enough, or they took a long time,” said Barkhouse. “Our powertrain is designed for everything from motorcycles and scooters right up to trucks.”

The trio have achieved that, he added, by designing their electric motors and battery packs to be mixed-and-matched to produce different power outputs. For example, it is possible to combine two 150 horsepower motors to create a single 300 horsepower unit. The individual motors are also designed to be scaled up for higher power outputs.

That flexibility makes Victory’s technology well-suited for use by race teams in series or events that can benefit from bespoke solutions, such as those fielding rally cars, as well as for heavy equipment and marine applications. As particular examples, Barkhouse cited the Baja 1000 race in Mexico and the Dakar Rally, which runs from France to Senegal and has a reputation for being singularly punishing on machinery.

“One of the things that we can do is … come in and develop an electric powertrain for you based on what we already have,” he said. “We just scale up or down certain components to make the powertrain suit your needs.”

In keeping with the current bleeding-edge of electric vehicle technology, Victory also builds its motors without rare earth metals, which are environmentally damaging to mine and often tied to humanitarian concerns. The decision frontruns similar planned moves by industry giants like Tesla and General Motors.

The business is entering commercialization this year, with the ACOA funding earmarked for hiring more staff and scaling Victory’s Saint John production facility. So far, the team includes five full-time employees and a handful of part-time staff. Barkhouse said how many additional people he and his co-founders hire will depend on demand for their motors.

“The space that we have is going to be our initial factory, and we’ll grow from there, as opposed to buying a massive factory and trying to fill it,” he said.