Jay Gerbrandt

Builder.
Mapper.
Canadian.

I build things that shouldn't need building but do. Right now that's Fruitbloom — bringing proven tech from allied democracies to Canada — and Squirrel Ridge, home to (Indige)nymy, a growing map of over 6,600 Indigenous place names across North America. Before that: strategy consulting at Bain, IPO and brand work at Rivian, a Series B at EvenUp. Self-taught developer. Harvard history grad. Everything else below is context.

Now

Active venture

Fruitbloom

Picking Canada's lowest-hanging fruit

Technology transfer from allied democracies — Norway, Japan, Lithuania, Iceland — into Canadian energy, mining, manufacturing, and computing. De-risked, launch-ready, domestically owned.

Fruitbloom operates at the intersection of four verticals: urban mining of critical minerals (Japan), floating solar microgrids for remote communities (Norway), photonic and laser manufacturing (Lithuania), and cold-climate sovereign AI compute (Iceland).

The model connects international technology owners with Canadian operators, with Fruitbloom as integrator. Every technology is already proven and commercially deployed in its home country — no R&D risk, no vaporware.

Fruitbloom is actively seeking partners, operators, and investors aligned with Canadian economic sovereignty.

Active venture

Squirrel Ridge
(Indige)nymy

6,600+ Indigenous place names, mapped

A non-profit mapping project cataloguing Indigenous toponyms across North America — 20+ languages, with meanings, endonyms, ISO codes, and source citations.

(Indige)nymy is built on a conviction that toponyms are property of Indigenous communities — this project makes their publicly documented names visible and searchable, as a first step toward direct community engagement.

Three map layers distinguish primary toponyms, awayonyms (names used outside core territories), and sleeping toponyms (historical transcriptions awaiting revival). Built on Felt, exported as GeoJSON, backed by a SQL database.

The project is free and open to the public. Submissions, corrections, and collaboration from Indigenous knowledge keepers are welcomed.

Vibecoded

Digital humanities

Tōfu Hyakuchin

One hundred delicacies of tofu, 1782

A trilingual edition of the world's first single-ingredient cookbook — 100 Edo-period tofu recipes with English interpretations, scholarly annotations, and a glossary of Japanese culinary terms.

Written by an Osaka seal-engraver under the pen name Kahitsujun — "why must it be rich?" — the book organizes recipes into six grades from Commonplace to Superb. Plain hot tofu ranks highest. Simplicity is the pinnacle.

The site presents each recipe with glossary-linked annotations. Original kuzushiji transcriptions and romanized transliterations are being added progressively through paleographic work.

Gaming tracker

Island HQ

Animal Crossing checklist hub

A tracker for Animal Crossing: New Horizons — art authenticity, critter availability, recipe collection, and island management in one place.

Island HQ tracks what you've caught, donated, and collected across all ACNH categories. Art authentication tells you which Redd paintings are genuine. Seasonal critter calendars show what's available right now.

Earlier chapters

Series B

EvenUp

$50.5M fundraise

Built the pitch deck and investor collateral for a successful $50.5M Series B fundraise.

IPO & brand

Rivian

Electric vehicles, from S-1 to showroom

Contributed to the IPO S-1 and investor narrative. Coordinated infotainment software strategy. Opened the first retail location. Led R1 → R2 → R3 brand architecture.

Strategy consulting

Bain & Company

PE, mining, and financial services

PE due diligence, multimillion-dollar cost transformations, and robo-advisor launch strategy across private equity, mining, and financial services clients.

Past venture

rapidte•st

Diagnostic testing, simplified

Commercialized Health Canada-approved Vitamin D self-tests via D2C sales. The earlier phase of what became Fruitbloom, under the Abundant Science umbrella.

rapidte•st applied simplified interfaces to at-home diagnostic testing — getting answers to patients faster and in contexts where traditional lab infrastructure isn't available.

Abundant Science (abundant.science) continues as the vehicle for scientific and research-oriented ventures.

Research project

Factso

Connecting disparate knowledge

A data-driven research collective building new frameworks for information organization — innovative taxonomies and relationship mapping across fields that don't usually talk to each other.

Factso's premise: a lot of what we call "new" knowledge is actually a reorganization of things we already know, made possible by drawing unexpected connections across domains. The collective develops tools and frameworks to make those connections deliberate.

Story

Memoir in progress

Overflash

Winning the lightning lottery

On January 5, 2024, a lightning strike through my car while driving ended with a crash, a 13-month mystery, and eventually a word I'd never heard: pathognomonic.

The arborescent rash — fern-like, tree-like, branching across my skin and gone within 48 hours — turned out to be a Lichtenberg figure. Pathognomonic for electrical injury. The only proof I would ever have, and I hadn't known to document it.

Overflash is a memoir about that night, the year that followed, and what it takes to trust your own memory when the systems around you refuse to.

An excerpt is available to read on this site. The book is in progress.

First career

Child actor

Before everything else

My first career was in front of a camera. It was an unusual way to start a life, and it left a permanent fingerprint on how I approach communication, storytelling, and collaboration.

I worked as a child actor, which is a strange thing to have been. It taught me how to inhabit a character, how to perform under pressure, and how to read a room. I've been drawing on those skills in every context since — the settings just got less scripted.

Get in touch

Let's find some time.

Book a time to talk. Partnerships, investment, collaboration, and curiosity are all welcome.

Connect →

Builder.Mapper.Canadian.