Imagine standing on a mountain in Tibet only to see a monk pull a mobile phone from their pocket. If you’re like Amanda Hall, the founder of Summit Nanotech, you’d be thinking, “What the heck is that person going to do with a mobile phone? They’ve taken a vow of silence.” To her amazement, the monk started typing a text.
As if that wasn’t a mind blowing revelation, you’d also have to be Amanda Hall to put two and two together and say, “I’m going to go back home to Calgary, quit my job, and start a lithium extraction business.” Her reasoning was, “If lithium batteries are in the mountains of Tibet, they are everywhere. And when I look at the way the Chinese government is ravaging the landscape in Tibet with its lithium evaporation methods, well then, mother nature needs some help.”
Amanda went home, sat down with a piece of paper, and developed an extraction method that would protect the environment and be of interest to investors. She looked at the human body and mimicked the loop of henle, where salts are separated from liquids. It worked in the lab, but not in the field.
Back to the drawing board. This time, to develop a membrane. Once again, it worked in the lab but not at scale. Back to the drawing board, refine, test, refine, test, refine, and test again. Smack in the middle of that research and development, COVID hit, shutting down the lab. Calgary banned access to offices within the city limits.
Innovators always find a way to keep going and in this case, Amanda and team found a barn on the outskirts of town, moved the lab there, and kept going. Confident they had the answer, they sent the test facility to South America, only to have it go missing in shipping.
Entrepreneurs don’t give up easily; they went on a search for the missing lab, found it, and got it to Chile to start new tests. The results were better but not good enough. Back to the drawing board.
As of December 2025, Amanda and her team have a winning formula. The next major hurdle is commercialization. Along the way, Amanda was able to continue to attract investment capital – not because everything she touched was a homerun, but because she never surrendered to the idea that her vision was unattainable, proving investors invest in the leader more than the idea.
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