Q&A: Quilt founder stitches together sustainable success

A kid from Alberta’s fossil-fuel heartland is now building a business around what he calls the most overlooked lever in the energy transition: the average home. Quilt, a construction tech startup focused on ductless heat pump systems, just raised $20 million in Series B funding, bringing its total to $64 million. The company is pushing deeper into Canada, adding its first Calgary installation partner — Harmony Heating & Air Conditioning — as Ontario climbs to become Quilt’s fourth-largest market for inbound homeowner demand. We caught up with founder and CEO Paul Lambert to talk origins, product strategy, and why he thinks sustainable buildings should feel like an upgrade, not a compromise.

SiteNews: What is the story of Quilt? How did it get started and what drew you into the heating and cooling industry?

Lambert: Quilt started during a very reflective moment in my life. I was on paternity leave, thinking hard about what kind of work was worth committing the next decade to. I had a personal rule that I wouldn’t start another company unless I was prepared to stay with it for a long time.

I kept coming back to climate change. When I thought about what poses the biggest threat to my kids’ generation, that was clearly it. From there, I worked backwards — not from a technology trend, but from the problem itself. Residential energy use turned out to be one of the biggest, least obvious levers for impact. Homes burn an enormous amount of fossil fuel, largely for heating and cooling, and yet the experience most people have with HVAC is outdated, inefficient, and frankly unpleasant.

That combination of huge climate impact, terrible user experience, and very little innovation from a consumer perspective pulled me into the heating and cooling industry, and ultimately led to Quilt.

How does your team’s approach differ from other heat pump technology on the market, and what led you to go ductless?

From the beginning, we questioned assumptions that had gone unchallenged for decades. While central HVAC systems work for many homes, they face inherent limitations. Studies show that 20-30% of conditioned air is lost through ductwork before it even reaches living spaces. And because these systems operate on an all-or-nothing basis, they can’t address the reality that different rooms have different needs — leaving homeowners choosing between uncomfortable temperature variations or paying to condition every room uniformly, whether those spaces are occupied or not.

Ductless heat pumps solve a lot of that at a fundamental level. You eliminate duct losses, you get room-by-room control, and the system is more responsive to how people actually live. Historically, centralization made sense when heating meant fire in the basement. With electric heat pumps, that constraint disappears.

Where Quilt is different is that we didn’t just adopt ductless — we rebuilt the entire system around modern expectations. We designed a modular architecture that balances efficiency, redundancy, and scalability. We built software into the system so it can improve performance over time, and be updated remotely. And we treated design as a first-order problem, not an afterthought, because people don’t want technology they have to hide.

Let’s go back in time to Alberta, the heart of fossil fuels, where you grew up. What was that experience like, and how does it inform your approach to business today?

It shaped me in many ways, some I wasn’t aware of until much later in life (some I may still not be!). 

First, I grew up in a very business friendly and entrepreneurial environment. My uncle was an entrepreneur in the oil patch who quit his corporate job to start a successful coil tubing company and I followed his whole journey from founding to exit. For most of my childhood, my dad was a partner and then the CEO of one of the largest law firms in Calgary, Bennett Jones. Most of their large clients were in Energy, of course. After leaving the firm, he joined a Private Equity fund and then stepped in as the CEO of one of their companies, an in-situ coal gasification company (turning coal into natural gas underground). So during my formative years in Calgary I got to meet many really successful entrepreneurs and business leaders through my dad. I had many role models that made the idea of being a CEO and an entrepreneur seem like a normal, realistic career path. 

I was also exposed to all the economic booms and busts that tracked the price of oil and saw the impact that had on the city. In boom times, the importance of energy to the global economy really hits you in the face.

But I was always a techy-creative type and was never interested in the extraction-oriented energy industry as a career. I moved to Vancouver for University and was surprised by all the stereotypes of Albertans I experienced out there, and how people vilified Albertans for producing oil. This was kind of shocking to me at first — these people I grew up with working in Oil & Gas were good people! Smart, ethical, caring — as full and complex and imperfect as any group of humans, but on the whole very good people, not villains. And I realized it’s a function of the environment (where the opportunities were, how the economy developed), not any particular innate qualities to the people working in that industry. People are going to go where the opportunities are and there will be talented, ambitious people, who will do great work. 

This is a big idea that reframed how I see many things around the world, but one of the main takeaways is that by shaping economic opportunity, you shape society. If you can direct that, you can change the course of everything. And this made me really want to be able to start to steer the direction we were taking with energy by creating opportunity and economic growth that moved us in a direction that had the best possible long-term impact on humanity that I could think of.

Congrats on your recent $20M Series B. What does it mean to you to generate that level of interest, and what will this funding enable Quilt to do?

Raising our Series B was validating, not just financially but philosophically. It shows that momentum is building. Demand from customers and installers has been growing hugely, so this funding allows us to scale to meet that desire.

We’re expanding our footprint, investing in new product development, and continuing to improve both the technology and the customer experience. It also gives us the ability to build long-term, which has always been the goal. We’re not trying to ship a one-off product; we’re building a platform for how homes will be heated and cooled for decades.

What is your vision for Quilt’s future, and what do you want its impact to be?

I want Quilt to be in millions of homes. I want it to be the normal, obvious pick for comfort — something people choose because it works better, looks better, and costs less to operate.

The broader impact is helping move homes off fossil fuels at scale. But the way we get there matters. The promise of the energy transition isn’t sacrifice — it’s that the future can actually be better. Quieter homes. More control. Better air quality. Lower bills. If we do this right, sustainability becomes a side effect of making something people genuinely want.

Lots of people have ideas for startups in construction technology, but most don’t last. What has Quilt done differently?

First, we committed for the long haul. We started with the problem, not a hype cycle, and we’ve been deliberate about building something durable.

Second, we take end-to-end responsibility seriously. We don’t just sell hardware — we think about installation quality, ongoing service, and what happens years down the line. That means investing deeply in operations and learning what “great” actually looks like in the field.

Third, we treat hardware like software. We design systems that can improve over time through updates and remote diagnostics. That mindset is unusual in HVAC, but it’s essential if you want to keep raising the bar instead of freezing it on installation day.

Are there any habits or routines you use outside of work to recharge or stay sharp?

Getting the basics right is super important and 95% of the battle in my opinion! Sleep, exercise, and diet. I get up pretty early to get a workout or run in before the kids wake up. I do a lot of thinking while running — for me running is 90% mental health and 10% physical health. In the spring I felt like I needed a challenge to motivate me so I signed up for the San Francisco marathon (first marathon) and became a vegetarian. I also mostly cut out alcohol, primarily for sleep quality reasons. The vegetarian thing has been WAY easier than I expected and is not only better for my health, it’s better for the climate. It’s the first ‘diet’ I’ve ever tried that I genuinely think I’ll stick with indefinitely. 

What is one book, podcast, or piece of content that has most influenced how you’ve built and run Quilt?

I read “Getting to Yes” by Fisher and Ury and it, along with “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, are two books I read early in my career that really shaped my thinking. 

I also love the Acquired podcast and learn a lot from it, that used to be a deep cut but now I think it’s one of the most popular podcasts in the world (well deserved!).