What started as a high school science project after the Lac-Mégantic rail disaster is now a biotech company trying to change what goes into everyday cleaning products.

Nivatha Balendra began by asking if naturally occurring bacteria could clean up oil spills without the harmful side effects of chemical dispersants. Inspired by the 2013 Lac-Mégantic derailment in Quebec, she collected soil samples along the St. Lawrence River and brought them to the laboratory at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, where she was doing a research apprenticeship.

There, Balendra isolated a bacterium that could ingest oil particles and appeared to be a novel strain. Her project, “Don’t Cry Over Spilled Oil!,” took her to the 2014 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Los Angeles, where she received the World Economic Forum Future Scientist Award and an invitation to the organization’s Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Tianjin, China.

In 2015, Balendra started an undergraduate degree at McGill in physiology with a minor in international development. She kept advancing her research while studying, but she also faced major personal challenges. At 20, she was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma. Shortly after, her mother died of cancer.

The experience deepened a view she had held since Lac-Mégantic, that chemistry should solve problems without creating new ones.

In 2018, Balendra was selected as one of six finalists in MaRS’ Women in Cleantech Challenge, a three-year accelerator that helped women founders move laboratory research toward commercial reality. The program offered mentorship, access to federal laboratories and a stipend that allowed participants to work full-time on building a business model.

She launched Dispersa in 2019 as a biotech company focused on cleaning agents and was still aiming at oil-spill remediation. Then the pandemic changed the company’s direction.

“The harmful surfactants used to break down oil slicks are also found in everyday cleaning products,” the source article says, from hand soap and shampoo to kitchen spray and laundry detergent. Balendra told her team, “We need to wipe the board.”

Dispersa shifted to making biosurfactants for household and personal-care products. Last year, Balendra won the Governor General’s Innovation Award for the company’s first product, PuraSurf, which the source article describes as “an affordable non-toxic biosurfactant that will eliminate nearly 1 million tons of CO² on scale.”

Surfactants are the molecules that allow oil and water to mix. According to Globe Market Research, the global surfactant market is worth roughly US$50 billion and growing, with more than half still derived from petrochemical feedstocks.

Eric Déziel, a microbiology professor at INRS who has studied biosurfactants for more than three decades, said the science has been around for years.

“For more than 20 years, we’ve been trying to convince people that it would be a good move for industry to move from synthetic surfactants to biological surfactants,” he says. “What prevented us was the cost.”

According to market research by IndustryARC updated in 2025, synthetic surfactants typically cost around US$4 per kilogram to produce, while bio-alternatives can cost more than US$34.

Déziel first met Balendra when she was a teenage apprentice in his lab. He said, “She’s a survivor.” He also said, “Nivatha is an impressive entrepreneur.”

Balendra said the company’s shift away from oil spills came down to the economics of building a business. “You can build a cool technology, but a cool technology doesn’t necessarily mean a scalable business,” she says.

Dispersa’s answer to the cost problem was to move away from refined sugars, plant oils and other virgin agricultural feedstocks and use waste streams instead. In 2021, the company patented BioEterna, a fermentation process that converts waste streams into biosurfactants. In 2022, it launched PuraSurf.

The company is already running pilot projects with two major industrial cleaning companies, though Balendra cannot name them because they are negotiating longer-term commercial agreements.

Dispersa says it has a goal of cutting production costs by roughly 50 percent and sees a path to full-cost competitiveness in the years ahead.

Last year, the company closed a $5.8 million seed financing round to hire across manufacturing, sales and operations and expand production capacity in Laval, Quebec. That includes moving from a 1,000-litre pilot reactor to a 50,000-litre commercial-scale fermentation system.

Meaghan Seagrave, director of Bioindustrial Innovation Canada, said scale remains the main barrier for companies like Dispersa.

“the hurdles that these companies face are definitely economies of scale,” she says.

Seagrave said Canada is strong at funding research and early-stage innovation, but has struggled to help companies reach the size needed to compete with established manufacturers.

“You may have a new way of doing it. It may be better from an environmental perspective, and you’ve done the math to prove the economics until you’ve actually scaled that and gotten it into the hands of your off-taker, but it’s still considered high-risk,” Seagrave explains. “We think 5.8 [million dollars] is a lot of money, and it’s a lot of money for a startup, but [for] a startup in this space, it’s pennies.”

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