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 BC and the Pacific Northwest. 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 BC and the Pacific Northwest — 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.

Earlier chapters

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.

Past venture

rapidte•st

Diagnostic testing, simplified

A platform to make sophisticated diagnostic testing accessible in more places — an initiative of Abundant Science, my parent company for scientific ventures.

rapidte•st applied advanced algorithms and simplified interfaces to early detection and health monitoring — with the goal of 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 beyond the current active projects.

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.

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 talk.

Partnerships, investment, collaboration, curiosity — any of these will do.

inquiries@jaygerbrandt.com

Builder.Mapper.Canadian.