Alfred Lam

Alfred Lam is a Partner at Chrysalix Venture Capital, a Vancouver-based firm (founded 2001 by Wal van Lierop) that has spent 20+ years backing technologies for resource-intensive and hard-to-abate industries — energy, mining, transport, chemicals, steel and cement, and forestry. Lam has been with Chrysalix since 2012 and is described as "an innovator, company builder and investor" with more than a decade of R&D experience, particularly in electrochemical systems. At the firm he is instrumental in developing investment theses and portfolio and fund strategy, and handles deal sourcing, due diligence, and portfolio management.

Beyond investing, Lam is an operator/company builder: he co-founded and incubated Mangrove Lithium, a University of British Columbia spin-off commercializing electrochemical lithium refining, and helped grow it from the lab. This operating experience anchors his current investment focus on ventures that enable "the circularity, electrification and decarbonization of large industrial sectors."

Academically, Lam holds a Ph.D. in Chemical & Biological Engineering from the University of British Columbia and a BASc in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo (2003). He has spoken publicly on venture capital and startup fundraising, including a University of Waterloo Engineering "office hour" (Nov 2021) on "Venture Capital Perspectives: What investors look for," a SPRINT Robotics webinar on funding robotic innovation, and as a speaker at the Resourcing Tomorrow mining conference.

Lam sits on multiple boards for Chrysalix portfolio companies. Across sources his board and active involvement spans Liminal Insights, Sortera Technologies, Helmee Imaging, Applied Impact Robotics, Feasible, Axine Water Technologies, General Fusion, and Primus Power.

• Invests in early-stage deep-tech (pre-seed/seed through Series A–B) that helps heavy industry reach carbon neutrality — his stated focus is enabling "the circularity, electrification and decarbonization of large industrial sectors."
• Check size roughly $2M–$15M, sweet spot ~$3M, deployed through Chrysalix's industrial-innovation / carbon-neutral funds.
• Thematic areas (per Chrysalix strategy): resource efficiency, alternative fuels, materials substitution and circularity, "carbon as a resource," negative-emission technologies, CO₂ capture, smart mining, water treatment, and carbon analytics/markets.
• Favors companies with hard-science moats — often university spin-outs — where scientific and scale-up risk can be systematically de-risked; his own background (PhD electrochemistry, Mangrove Lithium co-founder) signals a preference for technical founders solving industrial-scale problems.
• Values founders' understanding of the capital-intensive path to commercialization; his public talks emphasize what investors look for when they evaluate a startup for funding.