Canadian Business: For Blade Air, The Future is Clean Air for All
- Jennifer Crowley
- Jul 27, 2023
- 2 min read
Updated: Jul 9, 2024
Blade Air was recently featured on Canadian Business – Since its inception in 1928, Canadian Business has been a valued destination for business journalism in the country, covering the leaders and companies that matter most.
Founded to develop zero-waste carbon filters in 2017, co-founders and brothers Joe Fida, aged 28, Aedan Fida, 26, and friend Giancarlo Sessa, 26, pivoted during the pandemic to air purification technology and indoor air quality. With the foresight and vision to realize air would become the next frontier of health care, they are on a mission to educate and provide the tools needed to provide clean air for all.
For Sessa and the Fida brothers, the future is clear: clean air for all.
After struggling to find a carbon filter that met his needs when growing exotic fruits in his indoor grow tent during Canada’s harsh winters, Joe Fida did what every engineer would do: he built his own. And with that, Blade Air was born.
“When we entered the air filtration industry, it was really important for us to disrupt the industry and do things differently,” said Giancarlo Sessa, chief strategy officer and co-founder of Blade Air. “In air filtration, there is no one-size-fits-all approach so it was critical for us to offer a range of solutions that can be tailored to each of our customers’ needs and existing HVAC systems.”
Since its inception, the founders have been smashing the status quo and debunking common misconceptions about indoor air quality—most prominently that indoor air can be two to five times more polluted than outdoor air, a statistic that drew interest from Toronto’s Gooderham & Worts Distillery District. Widely regarded as Canada’s premier arts and culture destination, the Distillery District is an internationally acclaimed village of brick-lined streets, known for its rich history and identity with buildings that have been preserved and used for more than 150 years.
“There is a common misconception that you have to choose between energy efficiency and improved indoor air quality, and that’s simply not true,” said Joe Fida, chief innovation officer and co-founder of Blade Air. “Finding that symbiotic balance between the two is our north star, and is the reason that we do what we do.”
