MONTREAL — As a teenager growing up in B.C., Lightspeed CEO Dax Dasilva remembers attending protests at the province’s old-growth forests, part of a movement to protect the enormous trees from logging. The experience, he says, inspired a lifelong passion for conservation. “I’ve always been very connected to the Canadian landscapes, the abundance of landscapes here,” Dasilva told The Logic.

Now the head of one of Canada’s most prominent tech companies, Dasilva is hoping to use his wealth and influence to preserve threatened natural habitats around the world. On Tuesday he announced the launch of Age of Union, a new non-profit devoted to conservation, which he is funding with $40 million to be invested into environmental projects in different countries.

Age of Union has already partnered with five organizations—the Nature Conservancy of Canada, as well as groups in Peru, Congo, Haiti and Indonesia—which focus on causes like protecting endangered species and preserving and restoring freshwater reserves and other ecosystems. Dasilva said such projects often don’t have access to enough cash to plan ahead for their operations—a problem he has faced as an entrepreneur. He’s looking to change that by making long-term commitments to each organization. “They feel like startups to me,” he said.

The non-profit’s name comes from a book Dasilva published in 2019 about leadership, culture, spirituality and nature. Its investment in each organization will vary, and it has the capacity to fund more projects in the future, Dasilva said.

To increase awareness of its work, Age of Union is producing short documentaries about the initiatives, the first of which—We are the St. Lawrence, made in partnership with the Nature Conservancy—will premiere at a screening in Montreal on Oct. 26. 

As part of the effort, Dasilva and others involved with the project spent two weeks filming along the St. Lawrence River, where the Nature Conservancy and other groups have been trying to improve water quality and protect threatened wildlife like birds and whales. With the river visible from Lightspeed headquarters, it’s an effort that’s especially close to home, Dasilva said. The St. Lawrence is also the source of most of Montreal’s drinking water. “We sort of look at the river as an afterthought, and as something that’s not a part of us, but it very much is,” he said.