Every day, firefighters, industrial workers, and hazmat responders suit up in gear designed to keep them safe. But that protective gear usually contains a class of synthetic chemicals known as PFAS, which is being banned, as it's a known risk to human health and the environment.
Boxin Zhao, Ph.D., P.Eng., founder and CTO of EverBond and an endowed chair in Nanotechnology at the University of Waterloo, has spent his career studying how materials bond, repel, and react at the molecular level. Trent Ogilvie, ICD.D, and Everbond CEO, spent decades scaling industrial businesses, including growing ROCKWOOL North America from 60 employees to over 1,000 people and $500 million in revenue. Together, they are building a coating technology that is PFAS free and rethinks what protection means.
Current PPE fails in three compounding ways. First, it doesn't breathe. Traditional suits function essentially as rubber barriers: effective, but punishing to wear. In warm conditions, a worker might need a break after just 15 minutes of use. Second, today's gear operates on a one-hit-and-out basis: a single contact with a toxic agent requires immediate suit removal and full decontamination, dramatically limiting deployment time. Third, the PFAS chemicals responsible for the repellency that make PPE work are now being banned in jurisdictions around the world, creating a regulatory reckoning the industry can no longer defer.
"Wearability and protection limits have been known problems for years," says Ogilvie, CEO. "But PFAS have created the burning platform. They are now being banned in many places around the world, forcing manufacturers to change. And since they have to change, we see the opportunity to solve wearability and deployment issues at the same time."
EverBond's answer is a breathable reactive coating built on a fundamentally different principle than anything currently on the market. Rather than creating an impermeable barrier that blocks threats, the EverBond coating draws toxic agents in and neutralizes them on contact, in real time. A barrier can be breached, saturated, or degraded. A reactive coating that neutralizes on contact provides sustained, continuous protection, eliminating the one-hit deployment limit. The fact that it’s breathable, solves a problem that has constrained protective gear for decades. And because the chemistry doesn't depend on PFAS, EverBond is positioned as a ready alternative at precisely the moment regulators are forcing industry's hand.
The company has a published PCT patent, completed early licensing discussions, and established industry collaborations validating both the technology and the market need. Over the past 15 months, the technology has advanced significantly. EverBond has also secured both dilutive and non-dilutive funding, supporting two key development engineers, as it completes technical readiness and moves toward commercial deployment, with support from Velocity and WatCo.
"PFAS are already in our drinking water and everyday consumer products," says Ogilvie. "Firefighters and industrial workers know they are causing them harm, yet they've had no alternative. EverBond is more than a technical solution. It's a chance to protect the people who protect us, while making a meaningful contribution to environmental health."
For Zhao and Ogilvie, the PFAS problem is the burning platform that finally gave the industry a solution to the lingering problem of PPE breathability. EverBond's mission is to put better protection in the hands of the people who need it most, and to make sure the gear keeping them safe isn't slowly doing the opposite.