To partner with The Canadian Explorers, contact: contact@ethanmarcoux.com

May 6th, 2026 — Paul Ziadé, CEO & Founder of North Vector Dynamics (Podcast)

North Vector Dynamics is building precision, low-cost missiles to protect Canadian and allied skies. In Chapter One of Canadian Explorers, I sat down with Paul Ziadé to discuss developing a Canadian neo-prime, sovereign capability, startups, and what it means for Canada to start building again.

June 3rd, 2026 — Samuel Witherspoon, CEO and Founder of ANVIL (Article Spotlight)

Sam Witherspoon was building ANVIL a decade before defence was ‘cool.’ In the first Explorer Spotlight, I speak to Samuel Witherspoon at CANSEC about his experience building a sovereign defence company for over a decade, bureaucracy, procurement, and speed.

June 12th, 2026 — Karl Holmqvist, CEO and Founder of Lastwall (Article Spotlight)

Lastwall was StrongNorth’s first cybersecurity investment. In the second Explorer Spotlight, I spoke with Karl Holmqvist at CANSEC about cybersecurity and the opportunity to build from Canada.

June 17th, 2026 — Glenn Cowan, Founder and Managing Partner of ONE9 (Article Spotlight)

Glenn Cowan is a former JTF 2 Squadron Commander in Canada’s special forces and the founder of Canada’s first national security venture capital firm. We discuss customer discovery, domain expertise, founder traits, and thinking big.

June 25th, 2026 — Parth Mahendru, Founder and CEO of Prandtl Dynamics (Article Spotlight)

Prandtl Dynamics placed second in two Department of National Defence Counter-UAS Sandboxes, earning $750,000 in total prize money. Its acoustic technology can detect drones before they are powered on. We discussed acoustic counter-UAS technology, manufacturability, and what it takes to build a national-interest company in Canada.

June 29th, 2026 — Alain Cohen, CEO of Marconi Technologies (Interview)

Marconi Technologies became the first Canadian company to win business supported through SAFE. I spoke with CEO Alain Cohen about what this means for Canadian defence exports and how Marconi plans to work with Canadian startups and SMBs.

July 2nd, 2026 — Dr. Mike Peasgood, Founder and CEO of ENVGO (Article Spotlight)

ENVGO is building six-foot autonomous surface vessels designed to travel four times farther than conventional electric boats. I spoke with Mike Peasgood about building a new class of defence vessels, transferring aerial autonomy to the water, and what Canadian founders need to understand before entering defence.

July 9th, 2026 — Dr. Harvey Hawes, Founder and CEO of Building Bloc Systems (Article Spotlight)

Building Bloc Systems is building forward-deployed medical microfactories for war zones, disaster response, and remote environments. I spoke with Hawes about rebuilding medical supply chains, designing a company for both defence and civilian healthcare, and manufacturing what patients need where they need it.

July 10th, 2026 — Harley Finkelstein, President of Shopify (Interview)

Shopify President Harley Finkelstein backed ONE9’s defence-focused fund in 2022, when few Canadian investors wanted anything to do with the sector. We discussed what Canadian founders need to do differently, why they should look beyond local capital, how to reverse Canada’s brain drain, and why Harley believes the country is entering a new era of entrepreneurship.

July 14th, 2026 — Samuel Witherspoon, CEO & Founder of ANVIL (Podcast)

ANVIL is an Ottawa-based, 100% Canadian-owned defence technology company. Its platform links intelligence, operations, and planning. In Chapter Two of Canadian Explorers, I sat down with Samuel Witherspoon to discuss persistence, national security, and the decade-long path to building ANVIL.

July 16th, 2026 — Brandon Robinson, Founder and CEO of Horizon Aircraft (Article Spotlight)

Horizon Aircraft is building a hybrid-electric VTOL designed to take off like a helicopter and fly like a conventional aircraft. I spoke with Brandon Robinson about building a Canadian aerospace company, what capabilities the Cavorite X7 unlocks, private vs public capital, and the advantages of gliding.

July 21st, 2026 — Matthew Lombardi, Founder of the Icebreaker and Director at ONE9 (Interview)

Matthew Lombardi is the co-founder of The Icebreaker, Canada’s defence innovation network and newsletter, and a director at Canada’s first national security venture capital firm. I met with Lombardi to discuss what early-stage defence founders need to prove, Canada’s procurement problem, and whether more companies can reach Dominion Dynamics’ scale.

July 23rd, 2026 — Kath Intson, Founder and CEO of Sentinel R&D (Article Spotlight)

Sentinel R&D is automating the manufacturing of unmanned systems for the next generation of warfare. I met with Kath to discuss what Sentinel is building, why Canada and its allies need it, and what it takes to overwhelm adversaries with scale.

July 30th, 2026 — Alex Deslauriers, Founder and CEO of FireSwarm Solutions (Article Spotlight)

FireSwarm builds drone-agnostic autonomy for ultra-heavy-lift aircraft to fight wildfires and move critical loads through contested environments. I spoke with Deslauriers about the loss of his family’s properties, what the company is building, his perspective on the Canadian landscape, and how drones can fit alongside traditional aircraft systems.

Next Up:

NordSpace: Founder and CEO, Rahul Goel

Wyvern Space: Founder and CEO, Chris Robson

Dominion Dynamics: Founder and CEO, Eliot Pence

CSMC: Founder and CEO, Daniel Sax

Canada Rocket Company: Founder and CEO, Hugh Kolias

and more…

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Contact me: contact@ethanmarcoux.com

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Co-founders Alex Deslauriers and Melanie Bitner are life partners. On August 18, 2023, their family properties were among 56 destroyed near Gun Lake, British Columbia.
For two weeks, they watched helplessly as air crews fought the wildfires during the day and left each evening. Night-time conditions made flying too dangerous.

“It became a life mission to bring about a change to wildland firefighting.”

Later that year, Deslauriers and Bitner founded FireSwarm Solutions with David Thanh, an emergency-response and wildfire-logistics specialist. Instead of putting humans in harm’s way, FireSwarm decided to leverage ultra-heavy-lift drones to fight wildfires autonomously and fly when others can’t. They call it the ‘pickup truck of the sky.’ Its core technology combines a drone-agnostic swarming algorithm, command-and-control software, and onboard edge-processing hardware. The mission is to use drone swarms for repeated water delivery when conditions are too dangerous for people to operate in, including smoke, low visibility, and complex terrain.

“Drones do not have a home to go back to at night or a family to go back to the next day.”

FireSwarm is a dual-use company and is now part of NATO DIANA’s 2026 cohort. It is positioning itself beyond just wildfires, into defence and critical logistics. Intended applications include moving equipment through contested environments and, eventually, evacuating casualties. The product is currently ready for prototype operations and will be deployed in multiple exercises in the coming year.

I spoke with Deslauriers, FireSwarm’s founder and CEO, about losing his family properties, what the company is building, his perspective on the Canadian landscape, and how drones can fit alongside traditional aircraft systems. He believes that autonomous systems should extend humanity’s ability to protect, respond, and sustain.

“I dream of a world where disaster is no longer deadly, where autonomy carries life-saving aid to every community on Earth and outpaces the growing size and frequency of disasters before they can become a catastrophe.”

What is FireSwarm building, and why does it matter for Canada?

“FireSwarm is building integrated mission capability, including hardware, software, autonomy, and operational systems. This will enable ultra-heavy-lift drones to automatically execute missions in contested environments related to equipment transfers in wartime environments, and also, in time, casualty evacuation from advanced positions to field hospitals.”

What was the moment you realized that you needed to create FireSwarm?

“FireSwarm came about as a company based in B.C. to bring a solution to wildfire using ultra-heavy-lift drone swarms in 2023. It was born in the days between watching wildfire grow closer and closer to our community and then watching everything burn at night when it was unsafe for crews to fight to save our homes. Since 2025, we have been involved as a NATO DIANA innovator to bring about a swarming algorithm for ultra-heavy-lift drones as it pertains to national defence priorities for Canada.

On August 18, 2023, my family lost two properties along with over 50 of our neighbours in the area of Gun Lake, B.C. At that point, as an aerospace engineer, search-and-rescue technician, and commercial pilot, it became a life mission to bring about a change to wildland firefighting and emergency response.”

How big is Canada’s wildfire problem, and how much worse is it getting?

“The planet is getting warmer. The amount of fuel available in our forests is increasing, and the likelihood of forest fires becoming larger than they have been in the past is just increasing exponentially. Meaning, we need technology available today to support crews in forest management and early suppression to alleviate conditions where a fire left unattended will have cataclysmic results.”

Video: The founders’ family properties during the 2023 wildfire.

Why are drones the best way to address this?

“Through the use of AI drone autonomy, we’re able to extend the reach of firefighters and emergency-response crews across the provinces and around the world. When crewed aviation is unsafe, especially during nighttime fire-suppression operations, leveraging drones that do not have a home to go back to at night or a family to go back to the next day is a logical next step. We can leverage this technology to save humans, property, and values at risk, especially knowing that drone autonomy will have a cost per hour much lower than that of a helicopter of the same water-carrying capacity.”

What does FireSwarm actually build?

“We are terming ourselves as a 60% R&D company and 40% services company. In terms of the R&D, we are building the swarming algorithm and the onboard edge-processing device that is actually fitted on ultra-heavy-lift drones. We’re, by definition, a drone-agnostic solution, meaning any ultra-heavy-lift drone can be adjusted to fit - or we can adjust our solution to fit a variety of drone platforms. That is how we are setting ourselves up for success here, knowing that the ultra-heavy-lift drone category and uncrewed vehicles are nascent and will grow over time.

We are perfectly positioned to enable that autonomy in other adverse conditions and emergency-management use cases as well. We do need, as a technology company building end-to-end mission capability, a services arm that enables pilots and operators to execute on prototype projects with NATO, allies, and also wildfire agencies.”

Will FireSwarm be able to coordinate across different autonomous systems?

“We see a future where a common operating picture provides all of the data needed for our swarm algorithm to make decisions on the priority of missions and the safe travel of multiple types of drones in congested airspace. Our tech is then able to provide those solutions back to the common operating picture for a user (human on the loop) to oversee the situation of the drones being autonomously controlled.”

What stage is the product in, and what is preventing deployment and scale?

“The product itself is ready for prototype operations. We are deploying with a number of exercises this fall and into 2027. We are responsible for the full capability stack; however, we are not drone manufacturers. We are reliant on ultra-heavy-lift drones entering the market in order for our AI edge-computing device and our swarm algorithm to manage these machines. The first machine that is available is built by ACC Innovation in Sweden. The ThunderWasp is currently being sold commercially, and we are working with ACC to enable that machine to be flown autonomously in adverse conditions. We have two other drone manufacturers that we are currently in discussions with to bring about automation for those additional machines as well.”

Does FireSwarm replace existing wildfire aircraft or support them?

“Currently, wildfire suppression is executed by helicopters, airtankers, and water skimmers, all managed by a human flying in a bird-dog aircraft and humans on the ground managing the air operation. We see FireSwarm fitting in initially by supporting crews with rapid response logistics and also during nighttime suppression hours, when the ground or flight crews are getting some rest. These machines can take over fire-suppression efforts in nighttime hours while conditions are more favourable for suppression, yet they are too risky for humans to execute.

We see FireSwarm as a complement to existing wildfire aviation, not a replacement. Helicopters and aircraft will remain critical, but autonomous heavy-lift systems can add capacity, reduce risk, and help deliver certain missions more cost-effectively by operating around the clock. Our hypothesis is that a scalable swarm of three or more ultra-heavy-lift drones could provide the payload capacity of a medium helicopter while offering greater flexibility, persistence, and operational efficiency.”

What feedback are customers providing?

“The feedback we’re receiving from the wildfire industry is that this is a brand-new vertical that we are creating, and it is going to require time and effort to work through the regulations and also to work through pilot projects to ensure our solution is safe to be operated by wildfire agencies. In parallel, we are working with NATO to bring about our solution within the NATO concept of operations for slinging ultra-heavy-lift loads and, potentially in time, bringing casualties back from advanced positions.”

What do the next 12 months look like for FireSwarm?

“The next 12 months are focused on expanding prototype deployments, proving operational value with wildfire customers and our NATO Allies, and building the foundation for commercial adoption.”

What other Canadian national-interest startup is worth watching?

“A Canadian startup called SenseNet. A North Vancouver-based company has gone from innovation to commercial adoption and now is moving at a pace that will enable commercial success outside of Canada. They are to be watched because they have a great business model, great technology needed for early detection of not only wildfires, but also any situation that is worth keeping an eye on.”

Why build in Canada?

“Canada is perfectly positioned as the defence-innovation hub in the decades to come. We also have a massive wildfire problem that requires attention. The dilutive funding opportunities for Canadians are not as good as they are in the U.S., but we are working with Canadian companies and funds to bring about this sovereign capability for Canada specifically. We have been pulled in other directions, but we are staying true to bringing innovation that is Canadian-built for Canadians.”

If you’re building something in Canada, I want to hear about it. contact@ethanmarcoux.com

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This company is Sentinel R&D, a Hamilton, Ontario-based startup founded in 2024 that is building UAVs (drones) for the modern battlefield. Sentinel is automating composite manufacturing for unmanned systems cheaply and at scale for the next generation of warfare. The vision is that wars will be won not purely on what you can build, but on how much of it you can build.

“We’re building a manufacturing company masquerading as a drone company.”

In May, Canada’s Department of National Defence and Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence announced an arrangement establishing a joint venture between Sentinel and Ukraine-based Airlogix. With support from both governments, the partnership plans to manufacture Ukrainian drone systems in Canada for Ukraine’s Armed Forces and establish sovereign manufacturing capabilities for Canada.

“We need to fix the national mindset that, because we’ve had the privilege of living in peacetime, peacetime will continue forever.”

The company’s first drone is ReKam, the attritable reconnaissance and kamikaze platform. This is a modular, payload-agnostic fixed-wing drone that “flies like a bat out of hell,” designed to be reconfigured in the field in minutes between ISR, loitering strike, electronic warfare, and counter-UAS. The ReKam 3.2 has a range of over 500 km, with a top horizontal speed of 180 km/h+ and >300 km/h in a dive. The ReKam 5.0 is expected to have a range of over 800 km.

“I’m not going to let our ego about our systems get in the way of building great drones for anybody.”

Sentinel was co-founded by COO Chris Pye, CTO Anders Intson, and his sister and CEO Kath Intson. During Startupfest 2026 in Montreal, I met with Kath at World Trade Centre Montréal. We discussed what Sentinel is building, why Canada and its allies need it, and what it takes to overwhelm adversaries with scale.

What is Sentinel R&D building, and why does it matter for Canada?

“We’re building a manufacturing company masquerading as a drone company, so we're definitely focusing on the drone space. The reason this matters for Canada is that within Canada, and even within NATO, we don’t have mass-manufacturing capabilities in this space in an era of mass-saturation warfare.”

What was the moment that made Sentinel necessary?

“A lot of credit goes to my brother (Anders Intson) here. He’s our CTO, and he’s been a lifelong defence and miltech nerd. When he came to me with this, after a few years of research in Russian Telegram channels masquerading as a Russian aerospace executive, and said, “I think we need to build this,” a couple of decades of trust and his having previously proven out his theses to me in this space compelled me to join the team.”

What differentiates Sentinel’s manufacturing approach?

“There are a lot of drone manufacturers. I don’t even know what the numbers are. I’ve heard 4,000; I’ve heard 10,000 within NATO alone. The truth is that anybody can build a flying thing. You give a couple of high-school kids ChatGPT, and they can build a flying thing. The real rocket science is how you build a lot of flying things. Our differentiation is that, from the outset, we think about how you can build 10,000 a month of something. That goes into the design. It goes into our thoughts in terms of how we would actually scale an aircraft from prototyping. NATO has been focused on exquisite systems. Even within the drone space, we see a lot of drone designs that are over-engineered and really difficult to manufacture. When we see a new design come out from a company, we often think, “How are they going to make 10,000 of those things?” That is built in from day one when we take on a project.”

So the differentiator for Sentinel’s drones is that they can be manufactured cheaply and at scale?

“Correct. That’s a better way of putting it.”

Will Sentinel remain focused on aerial drones?

“Let’s define drones, because I think we’re talking about UAVs right now. There are emerging areas of UGVs and USVs that I think are where we will turn our attention next. I’m really interested in the UGV space because we’re at the very beginning of conducting the first military operations in that space. I’m definitely watching that closely. Drones are the focus in the near term, but not necessarily UAVs.”

Generally, unmanned systems?

“Unmanned systems and flying things. Flying things could also be interceptors. They could also be missiles. We’re starting our first preliminary pokes into that space. Long term, the focus will be on flying things and autonomous things.”

On the significance of UGVs in warfare

“In terms of logistics and rescue operations - deliveries, supply management, and safely sending a vehicle into territory to take people out - this has already been proven in Ukraine. The first rescue operations have been proven in rescuing civilians or soldiers from occupied areas. I’m really interested in that space.”

Is it a similar model to what you are doing now?

“They’re made out of the same materials. The flying drones are made out of the same materials as the ground drones, so I don’t see why not.”

On the joint venture with Airlogix

“The partnership came about almost by default. A few folks are going to be upset by me saying this, but it’s the truth: nobody is building flying things end-to-end in Canada besides Sentinel. We’re the only ones building fixed-wing drones in Canada end-to-end, from the airframe to full integration. We were the default choice for this partnership. We built some good contacts in Ukraine. We met Airlogix at CANSEC in 2025. It was not something that was on our minds at that time, but we’d known them from being in the space and thought very highly of them. It’s kind of a dream. We really admire the company. They’ve been doing amazing things, and the people there are great. There was also a great cultural fit between the companies. You have to be careful who you start a joint venture with because it’s a marriage.

NATO overall needs this mass-manufacturing capability. I don’t care whose systems I build. We build great proprietary drones, but I’m not going to let our ego about our systems get in the way of building great drones for anybody. Having the capability to manufacture lots of systems is of sovereign importance to any country and to NATO overall.”

Was Airlogix specifically looking to partner with a Canadian company?

“Yes.”

Is manufacturing in Canada a particular draw compared with other NATO countries?

“Many countries are looking to onshore manufacturing right now, so I don’t think we’re necessarily special in that regard. When I look at other companies building in the autonomous space, I’m not aware of anybody else, besides the 3D-printing companies, focused on scalable manufacturing with composite and fibreglass airframes, which is what most of the world’s attritable airframes are made from.

Russia has been successful in scaling that manufacturing, but they do it with a lot of manual labour. Figuring out how to do that without a lot of manual labour is important for NATO overall and for the sovereignty of any country. We would go to any allied country and help them stand up their manufacturing.”

Can you give an idea of the cost of Sentinel’s manufacturing compared with alternatives?

“It comes down to a few different things, and you have to do the analysis system by system. Overall, we’re faster. You have to think about how much space an airframe occupies in a factory, and for how long, before it is ready. That goes into the cost analysis. Then there are materials. We manufacture using less material. Because it’s automated, you will have fewer defective products, so your quality control will be better. That goes into the cost savings. Most importantly, there is labour: if you can remove a lot of the labour from what is traditionally a very labour-intensive and time-consuming process, that cuts costs.

Then you have to consider how many systems you’re making. If you’re only making five drones, why would you move to fully automated manufacturing? That’s why nobody has done it. If you look at a 777, there are only going to be so many 777s made. It doesn’t make sense to have a dark factory making 777s. But when you look at something producing 120 systems a month, automation begins to make sense. At 10,000 a month, it makes a lot of sense.”

How scalable is the process? How quickly could a new facility be opened in Canada?

“It depends. If I were being optimistic, four months. You can build a factory in four months. The question is how quickly you can get that factory to manufacture lots of things. That is really hard to do.”

How important is direct Ukrainian battlefield feedback?

“We’re in Ukraine all the time. It was a foundational piece of what we’re doing. Companies in defence love to build things and then try to go over and sell them. That was not our approach. We went over and said, “If we have this capability to manufacture a lot of things, what would be on your wish list? What would the features look like? What cost point would get end users and ministries of defence excited?” We designed our product based on the feedback we received, not the other way around. We didn’t design something we thought was awesome and then approach end users and try to sell it.

Being collaborative with militaries from day one is important. It’s also how you build trust. We’ve seen companies donate things just to get the “tested in Ukraine” check mark. That means nothing if the product is not consistently used there. The question is: why isn’t it being used? Is it the price point? Is it the efficacy? Building something efficacious at the right price is how you build trust with end users.

My advice to founders looking to get into Ukraine is: go.”

Where is the battlefield going?

“I’m not in charge of the R&D pipeline. Unfortunately, I’m not smart enough to forecast the future of warfare, but I’m good at finding the people who are and hiring them. I think it’s going in the direction of whoever can build the cheapest drones. This is a war of economics. Close-quarters combat is a war of economics to some degree because air-defence systems are more expensive than drones.

Some companies are starting to develop cheap missiles and cheap interceptors, but the cost of the drones themselves will be driven down again, and there will be another cycle of innovation. For the foreseeable future, I think we’re facing a mass-saturation drone-warfare battlefield.”

What does Canada need to fix?

“We need to fix the national mindset that, because we’ve had the privilege of living in peacetime, peacetime will continue forever. We exercise a lot of soft power as a nation by being a capable ally. The first thing any foreign military says to me is how much they love working with the Canadian Armed Forces and our special forces. They tell me how capable and collaborative they are. I wish we had talked about it more because the capabilities of our military have allowed us to exercise a lot of soft power as a middle-power nation. The rest of the nation needs to wake up to the fact that having a capable military is what protects us. We have to stay at the edge.

I was delighted by how popular this drone deal was in Ukraine. Like anybody else, we lurk on the Reddit posts made about our company. It was endearing to see that Russian bots saying, “They’re pissing off the wrong person,” were downvoted into oblivion. It wasn’t just Canadians saying, “No, we need to be building drones.” The rest of the world was defending the deal. I looked into it more. Canada is one of the most popular nations in the world socially. There are many countries like Canada. It ranks up there with Switzerland and a few other nations. I had forgotten how well-liked Canadians are. I was thrilled to see that the deal was supported globally.”

What do the next 12 months look like for Sentinel?

“Just executing. We’ve got to execute. This deal has not been without controversy. Some Canadian businesses have been vocal about being disappointed that we were the chosen company. Little, tiny Sentinel was the only company building drones end-to-end within Canada. We’ve got to make sure we build all the drones, build them on time, and that they work on the battlefield.”

What other Canadian national-interest startup is worth watching?

“Dominion, of course.”

Why build in Canada?

“Because we’ve woken up.”

If you’re building something in Canada, I want to hear about it. contact@ethanmarcoux.com

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Through The Icebreaker, Lombardi has co-founded the Canadian Defence Investor Network with ONE9, launched Canada’s first defence tech hackathon, and recently produced a joint study with the BDC (Business Development Bank of Canada) on SME participation in defence. The mission is to make Canada a net exporter of defence technology by 2030.

Lombardi has personally invested in Canadian defence companies, including Dominion Dynamics and North Vector Dynamics. He argues that Canada already has the talent, stability, and resources to produce serious defence companies. What Canada lacks is a reliable pathway for companies to put their technology into the hands of Canadian troops.

During Startupfest 2026 in Montreal, I met with Lombardi to discuss what early-stage defence founders need to prove, Canada’s procurement problem, and whether more companies can reach Dominion Dynamics’ scale.

“I’ve invested in a Canadian drone company that found it easier to put their drones into the hands of Ukrainian troops than Canadian troops.”

In one sentence, what is The Icebreaker, and why does it matter for Canada?

“The Icebreaker is Canada’s defence innovation network. We’re focused on providing opportunities for startups working in the defence and dual-use space to have greater access to opportunities, ultimately to equip Canada’s Armed Forces. Our goal is to make Canada a net exporter of defence technology by 2030. The burning platform here, the real need, is that the nature of conflict has changed. The nature of the threat landscape has changed. The conflict in Ukraine really shows us that we do need frontier technologies for Canada to achieve a better level of deterrence.”

How do The Icebreaker and ONE9 fit together?

“I co-founded The Icebreaker just over a year ago. Through that Icebreaker network, we’ve done a lot of initiatives to build up the defence-tech ecosystem, from hackathons to proprietary data and research collection that fed into the DND Defence Industrial Strategy. More recently, we produced some proprietary data on defence financing that The Icebreaker did in conjunction with BDC.

Through these initiatives, I’ve been angel investing on my own as well. Sometimes I invested in companies that I’d known for a longer time; other times, I was angel investing in companies that I met through The Icebreaker. For example, I’m personally an angel investor in Dominion Dynamics. I’m personally an angel investor in North Vector Dynamics and a handful of other companies, some that you’d have heard of, some that are stealth, but all of which are Canadian sovereign defence tech. In the course of investing my own personal money and working on various initiatives through The Icebreaker, I started to run across Mike, Glenn and the team at ONE9. I just really liked them. I liked them first as people. I liked them as investors. I liked their investment philosophy. When I found out that they were raising a second fund, it felt like a really natural fit.”

How does Canada convert technical talent into companies and contracts?

“That is the multi-billion-dollar question. We do not have an innovation problem in Canada. What we actually have is a buyer problem. We need more pathways for Canadian companies to put their technology into the hands of our troops to get those iterative feedback cycles quickly.

I’ve invested in a Canadian drone company that found it easier to put their drones into the hands of Ukrainian troops than Canadian troops. That says two things. One, it says great things about that specific company, that they were willing to do what it took. But it says really bad things about the Canadian landscape for innovation that we have this incredible technology, and there’s just no pathway for our own military to buy it. That’s what we really need to change. It’s not about money. It’s not about innovation. It’s about pathways to procurement.”

What traits do you look for in an early founder?

“Great question. One of my favourite questions. In early-stage investing, when you’re pre-revenue, sometimes you’re just at the prototype stage. The TRL number might not be particularly high. It really is about: has this person built a great product? Will they do whatever it takes to get it into the hands of potential customers and users? Have they created an opportunity for themselves and their company to find a pathway to getting a buyer? For a lot of Canadian defence companies in the past, that has meant a foreign buyer. A different NATO military would be their first buyer. The ones who want to hustle and have been able to work at it successfully, in spite of our broken procurement system, have managed to do amazing things. We have an incredible history of military innovation in this country. What I look for is those three things and a combination of them that can really have a bias to action.”

What’s the number-one advantage that companies have by operating in Canada?

“There are so many advantages. We have an incredibly educated population, full of engineering talent, proximity to academic institutions, relative stability and peace in the country, which no one should take for granted with the way the world is these days. There is plenty of access to capital if you know where to look for it, and increasingly, Canadian institutions are starting to embrace defence, so there will be more capital. We have every advantage you can imagine. We just have to start to convert it into contracts for our own companies.”

Can Canada become a global leader in innovation?

“We already are a global leader in innovation. If you look at some of the most successful companies in Silicon Valley, a disproportionate number of them are founded by Canadians. We just need to be able to embrace that mentality here at home.”

Dominion just raised C$139 million. Do you foresee more Canadian defence startups reaching this scale?

“Absolutely. I think we’re going to see at least 10 to 15 Canadian defence techs achieve the same valuation or greater. And we have to. We absolutely have to.”

What is the most underrated national-interest niche?

“It’s not an underrated niche anymore, but for quite a long time, I’ve been trying really hard to learn about and pay attention to the quantum space, and specifically quantum cybersecurity. I think everybody is alive to the risks of what they call Q-Day, when quantum can sort of decrypt current internet cybersecurity writ large. It’s rapidly approaching, and I think a lot of organizations need to work hard to get prepared for it. It doesn’t just mean the military. It means critical civilian infrastructure, power grids, water-treatment plants, you name it. Q-Day is coming, and it’s an enormous risk.”

What do the next 12 months look like?

“I just started at ONE9, which I’m very excited about. It’s my third week on the job. My plan for the next 12 months is: one, we’ll close the fund; and two, there’s an incredible pipeline of Canadian companies that we’re looking to diligence and back.”

What’s one Canadian national-interest startup that you’re focused on?

“Right now, I’m strongly focused on North Vector Dynamics, which is Canada’s only precision-missile company out of Calgary. I was just in Calgary two days ago, meeting with them. Just an incredible technology, an incredible group of technical co-founders, and frankly, missile defence is a huge gap in Canada’s sovereign stack.”

If you’re building something in Canada, I want to hear about it. contact@ethanmarcoux.com

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Its patented HOVR Wing design uses 12 lift fans embedded in the wings for electric vertical takeoff. Once the aircraft reaches sufficient altitude and speed, sliding panels cover the fans, reducing drag so the aircraft can fly like a normal gas-powered plane. The aircraft recharges its lift-fan batteries in flight and can then land vertically on a helipad or use a traditional runway.

Horizon Aircraft is a Canadian aerospace company based in Lindsay, Ontario, co-founded by CEO Brandon Robinson and his father, Chief Aircraft Architect Brian Robinson. Brandon served in the Royal Canadian Air Force and has spent over two decades as a fighter pilot, including as a Top Aces Fighter Pilot. Horizon Aircraft (HOVR) began trading on the NASDAQ in 2024 and currently has a market cap of over US$100 million.

The Cavorite X7 is designed for operations including medical evacuation from isolated areas, organ delivery, time-sensitive cargo in underserved remote regions, ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance), and search and rescue. It burns less fuel than a traditional aircraft conducting similar missions, and as battery technology continues to advance, Horizon expects to transition to fully electric flight.

The aircraft is designed for a maximum speed of 450 km/h and an 800 km range, with capacity for six passengers plus a pilot and a 1,500-pound useful load. According to the founder, the aircraft can fly twice as fast and twice as far as a helicopter at up to 75% lower cost per unit mile. The underlying technology is working today, and Horizon will begin assembling its first full-scale aircraft “imminently.”

“We are always limited by the slowest aircraft in the fleet.” — Brandon Robinson

I spoke with Brandon Robinson, CEO and co-founder of Horizon Aircraft, about building a Canadian aerospace company, what capabilities the Cavorite X7 unlocks, private vs public capital, and the advantages of gliding.

“There’s a reason why you don’t see large birds with these tiny little propellers on top.” — Brandon Robinson

What is Horizon Aircraft building, and why does it matter for Canada?

“We are building a hybrid electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft that can take off and land just like a helicopter, but travel about twice as fast and be up to 75% cheaper to operate per mile and much safer and quieter than a helicopter. So, a pretty unique piece of kit.”

What does hybrid-electric VTOL unlock that traditional aircraft cannot?

“About half of the helicopters simply go from point A to point B in this world. And that’s, you know, a 70,000-helicopter fleet. Half of them simply go from one place to another. We thought building, with some revolutionary new technology, essentially a helicopter capability that was twice as fast, again, up to 50 to 75% cheaper per mile than a helicopter, much safer and faster, was a winning combination.

Initial use cases: imagine getting someone to the hospital from an emergency medical situation. Getting them to the hospital in half the time, or from twice the distance in that golden hour. So emergency medical services are a really exciting sort of initial use case. Alongside any sort of critical cargo you need to go from point A to point B, to a remote location, and/or between two points that don’t necessarily have a runway on either side. But it’s going to be a very compelling machine.”

Where do you see the strongest defence application?

“I flew two decades in the Royal Canadian Air Force as an F-18 fighter pilot. At the peak of my career, I was planning and leading NATO coalition strike missions in training to go and practice taking people out of harm’s way. Maybe it’s a pilot who had to eject beyond enemy lines. We go get them, practice going and getting them, and we’re bringing them back home to safety. Maybe it’s dropping off troops, special forces troops, in difficult locations. Or maybe it’s resupplying forward operating bases.

All of those missions require VTOL aircraft that can land at unprepared locations. We are always limited by the slowest aircraft in the fleet. The X7 is essentially a helicopter with that same capability, but it’s much, much faster. That would have been extremely useful for all of those missions that I mentioned, and is going to be broadly applicable for dual use, unquestionably.”

Are you working with military operators or government customers?

“We are. We won a prestigious United States Air Force AFWERX contract for high-speed vertical takeoff and landing aircraft a few years ago that helped us expedite our large-scale prototype that’s already successfully flown and been through transition, and inform the design that we’re currently working on, for which we’ll have a full-scale aircraft here in the next six to nine months.

We’re hearing that if the aircraft does what you say it can do, or even close, then we’re very interested. As one would be, right? Essentially, a helicopter that’s twice as fast and has a lot of other operational advantages. It’s lower sound, a lower radar cross-section on the military side, is a lot safer than helicopters are, a lot cheaper to operate, which actually does matter to a lot of militaries. We’re hearing interest from the U.S. Department of War, as well as from militaries in Europe and beyond. Our phone is ringing off the hook, essentially.”

What does remote and all-weather operation mean for Canada’s North?

“What I would say is it’s designed as a traditional commercial aircraft, able to operate in any condition. You fly up to 10,000 feet; it’s much colder up there. You fly in any sort of clouds, and it might have some icing. This is not a good-weather machine. We wanted to come from a very practical space. I spent 20 years flying jets in the Air Force. I wanted a machine that was built for the real world. It’s not necessarily specifically designed for remote, icy and bad weather conditions, but it’s just designed to be really, really tough and to operate in any sort of commercial environment. A lot of helicopters can only operate in very good weather conditions. A lot of people don’t realize this. Any sort of clouds, they avoid; any sort of icing conditions, of course, they will avoid.

There are a lot of reasons for that, but that leads to a lot of helicopter accidents where they’re trying to fly low underneath the clouds, or they’re trying to avoid flying into clouds during bad weather operations. So we’ve designed a tougher, more robust commercial aircraft than a traditional helicopter. And our configuration is uniquely designed for that.”

On helicopter safety

“I think helicopters are amazing. They’re incredible machines that defy physics. Well, they don’t defy physics; let’s be honest. They defy common sense from a certain perspective. They’re very, very, very good at taking off and landing vertically, at hovering in one place for a long time. They move a lot of air, sort of very slowly, and that makes them very efficient in hover. But they pay an incredible penalty for that design configuration throughout the majority of their trip from point A to point B. They are incredibly inefficient.

There’s a reason why you don’t see large birds with these tiny little propellers on top. Nature would have figured that out. Natural wing-borne lift is the most efficient way to get from point A to point B for any sort of flying machine at scale. We wanted to design a machine that could take off and land vertically, but primarily, for 98% of the trip, it would be just like a normal commercial aircraft that everybody knows. Again, flying in bad weather, cold weather, in clouds, and leveraging an incredible lift-to-drag ratio: 10 to 1 versus 4 to 1 on a helicopter.

For all of those missions that require long-duration hover, we have not invented anything better than a helicopter. They will continue to do good work in the future. I just want to be clear about that. But for any mission that requires helicopter capability to get in and out of a place that doesn’t have an airport, this is going to be an extremely disruptive machine in this space.”

The advantage of gliding

“From a safety perspective, again, a helicopter cannot glide. I’ve been in a helicopter in an engine-out scenario, and it’s called an autorotation. You’re basically falling like a brick. You build up enough energy in the rotor system to then, at the end, sort of do this crazy maneuver and land in sort of a 45-degree cone that’s underneath you. If there’s unfortunately no area to land, you’re going into the trees. If you’re lucky enough to have a flat space, you can land. If not, you can’t glide at all in the helicopter.

With our aircraft, in the worst-case scenario, if the engine fails, you’ll be able to glide just like a normal aircraft. Then you pick any spot. Glide 10 miles over that way, pick any spot, and then be able to open the wings and land using the electric propulsion that’s on board. From a safety perspective, it’s a helicopter with an order of magnitude more safety aspects that are keeping people safe.

From a redundancy perspective, if the one main rotor fails on the helicopter, bad news. A helicopter also has mast bumping. It’s a fancy word for it cuts off its own tail. Every once in a while, that happens; it’s in the news, tragically. The helicopter, if it cuts off its own tail, can’t survive. Our aircraft can actually lose a bunch of the rotors and still be able to land vertically. And by the way, it’s flying around just like a normal aircraft, so it has to actually lose a wing or something to have any sort of big issue. From a safety perspective, a lot of different ways that this aircraft will be a lot safer than a traditional helicopter.”

Why go public instead of raising private capital?

“You have to really know what you’re doing. If you’re going to go public, you need to have a strong story, and you need to have the right market conditions in order to do that. We knew what we were getting into. It wasn’t my first rodeo when it came to public market experience. And we found the right partners to make it make sense. It is a difficult thing to do. Back in 2024, and even further than that, because it takes quite a long time to prepare it, so call it 2023, post-COVID, there was not a lot of capital in the private markets for investment in deep tech and hard tech companies.

Everyone was trying to figure out what was going to happen post-COVID, and they were keeping all of their money sort of on the sidelines. There was a lot of dry powder, quote-unquote, that was not deployed on the venture capital side, especially in Canada. On the private side, especially for aerospace, deep tech, and hard tech, there was not a lot of capital available. So the public play made a lot more sense than it would now.

Fast forward to a company that has amazing defence tech and amazing commercial potential, and we’ve proven it. If it were right now, like July 2026, I might not make the same decision, but we’re pretty happy where we ended up. We have $78 million in the bank. We have a couple of years of development capital. We’ve managed to avoid major dilution events that a lot of other microcaps have suffered. I’m pretty happy it all worked out, and I’d have to reevaluate if it was right now, whether I would do it in these current market conditions, which are more favourable for support of private companies.”

Where is the technology today?

“The technology is working today, which is amazing. We have main propulsion units. They’re spinning up, producing for us from a vertical lift perspective. Aerodynamics are looking great. Structure is looking great. We will have the main structural elements, the main structure in the hangar, in the next few months, which is pretty cool. And we will start to put together an aircraft that looks like an aircraft. The empennage, the fuselage, the main wings, and the canards will all be finished and rolling in pieces into the main hangar shortly. And we’ll start assembling our first full-scale aircraft imminently, which is pretty exciting.

We could have pre-sold thousands of these aircraft already. We decided to say no until we were a little further along. A lot of the other companies have these massive order books, loosely binding LOIs with no down payments and all sorts of communications that look great from a PR perspective. But we decided not to play that game. Now that we’re further along and we’re going to have a full-scale aircraft that’s coming out of the hangar pretty soon, we’re basically starting to talk to partners that are a little more serious. Maybe putting non-refundable down payments down, maybe booking solid slots in the early production line. More to follow on that.”

How much cheaper, and what is the expected aircraft cost?

“Up to 75% cheaper per unit mile.
This will only apply to the first few customers, but after some early customer discounts, it’ll be in the US$6 million to US$7 million range.”

What is the manufacturing plan?

“Many of these companies are planning on selling 1,000 to 2,000 of these aircraft per year and producing that many. We’re taking a more traditional route. It’ll be 200 to 300 aircraft and a very profitable production line. I think the key to note is that we’re not becoming an operator at the same time. So we are only manufacturing a really awesome airplane. We’re not also trying to build out an operational arm or become like an advanced air mobility airline at the same time. So that allows us to focus and keep things very efficient.”

Was there a specific moment when you knew this needed to exist?

“At the peak of my career, I’d been planning and leading NATO coalition strike missions in training or recovery missions in training where we go and practice taking pilots from beyond enemy lines. We’re always limited by, and doing some other special forces infiltration, exfiltration and some other missions, we’re always limited by the slowest vertical takeoff and landing aircraft in the fleet, which is a typical helicopter, like a Black Hawk or even a Chinook or something like that.

Fast forward to when we got Ospreys, it was amazing because we could essentially get 1.5 times faster with those Ospreys. But they’re $85 million a copy. And if you want four Ospreys to take off, you plan on eight of them trying to take off because they’re so complicated that they break a lot. So this would have been an order of magnitude cheaper, just as fast, and could have provided a lot of operational utility on the military side. There are tons of missions. I’m just scratching the surface of where this thing would have been amazing. The Marines for resupply, ship to ship, all sorts of really, really cool stuff that you could do with it. Anti-submarine warfare, dropping sonobuoys. Again, without any prepared infrastructure, you can take off and land from the ship, and you can go twice as far, twice as fast. That’s just scratching the surface. It’s going to be an exciting military machine.”

Advice to Canadian hardware founders

“I think what I would say is that the times are changing a little bit. Ten years ago, five years ago, you’d take your amazing idea; you’d go south of the border, where it’s much more aggressive, much more competitive, but the winners get disproportionately rewarded. In Canada, the ethos has always been that they’d rather give 10,000 companies $1,000, which is going to do nothing, than give two companies $5 million to actually do something useful and make them much more competitive. In the States, it’s the opposite. It’s much more competitive, but you can get meaningful capital to start your business: deep tech, hard tech.

Canada, I think, is starting to change, which I love. I love being supported by the government. And, of course, with any sort of military angle now, the increased requirement for defence spending is going to help companies with dual-use technology, which is fantastic. But I would say to any other Canadian entrepreneur, hang in there. It’s changing. You don’t necessarily have to go south of the border. As attractive as it is.”

Why build in Canada?

“Selfishly, I’m just a Canadian patriot. I love the country. I think in many ways we’re just a very solid group of people who don’t change our minds from day to day. We’re a pillar of moral character in a time when it seems to be drifting a little bit. I love Canada. I think it’s a great place to build a company. I think it’s a bunch of great folks who have a lot more tenacity than the world realizes. And we’re just a stable place to build some really great tech. I’m a bit of a patriot, having spent a couple of decades in the military. I love the place. I think it’s got a lot of potential. It needs a few tweaks to unlock its full potential from an economic powerhouse perspective. We’ve got the people, we’ve got the technology, we have the natural resources, and we’re afraid to use all of those things. But I think that fear is starting to go away, and I think the mechanisms to enable true Canadian explosive growth are starting to happen.”

If you’re building something in Canada, I want to hear about it. contact@ethanmarcoux.com

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ANVIL is an Ottawa-based, 100% Canadian-owned defence technology company. Its platform links intelligence, operations, and planning. It structures mission-critical data and enriches it with AI to support military and national-security decision-making. Sam now projects that ANVIL will reach 600–700 employees, all in Canada, within the next two years. The company is completely bootstrapped.

Last month, I spoke with Sam at CANSEC about procurement, bootstrapping, and what new founders misunderstand about defence. This conversation goes deeper into the founder's journey of how he got here.

Sam wanted to become a historian, studied engineering, graduated during the Great Recession, and then entered law. He started ANVIL under a different name to build legal records-management software. The court wanted the product but had no budget or authority to run a pilot. A later pivot captured part of the family-law market and led to an investigation and litigation with the Law Society. Eventually, the team turned toward national security.

There were many points where Sam could have quit. ANVIL exists because he stayed persistent.

“It’s hard to hit a home run if you’re not at bat.” — Samuel Witherspoon

Fortune Favours the Bold.

Topics Discussed

00:00 - Cold open

00:45 - Introduction

01:29 - What ANVIL is and its thirteen-year path

02:42 - Finding purpose in defence and national security

04:44 - Childhood: history, war films, and engineering

09:18 - Entrepreneurship and Sam’s grandfather

13:49 - Graduating into the Great Recession and choosing law

17:49 - The Federal Court and first exposure to national security

19:40 - ANVIL’s first product

21:19 - The Law Society investigation and pivot

24:13 - Persistence and entering defence through services

26:02 - Escaping the services-to-product trap

29:36 - Early product contracts with PHAC and DND

31:41 - US SOCOM and operational deployment

33:01 - What Canada underestimates about itself

36:02 - Ottawa’s GovTech opportunity

38:33 - Canada’s inferiority complex

39:02 - Cities, housing, transit, and attracting talent

43:59 - ANVIL’s next chapter

45:40 - Projecting 600–700 Canadian employees

46:18 - Pray for peace, plan for war

47:43 - Resilience and taking another swing

At Startupfest in Montreal, after his onstage conversation with former UFC champion Georges St-Pierre, I spoke with Harley about building in Canada. He joined Shopify in 2010, when it was still an early Ottawa startup, and helped build it into Canada’s largest tech company, now worth over US$150B. He is also an active investor in Canadian founders, including as a backer of ONE9’s Special Mission Fund I, Canada’s first security-focused venture capital fund.

We talked about what Canadian founders need to do differently, why they should look beyond local capital, how to reverse Canada's brain drain, and why he believes the country is entering a new era of entrepreneurship.

“Do things. Tell people.”

Recorded at Startupfest in Montreal on July 8, 2026

Canada’s global technology leaders

“I look at ONE9. I look at Dominion. We’re killing it on the defence side of things. If you look at every vertical, every industry vertical, Canada has one of the leaders. Whether it’s Cohere or Wealthsimple or Plusgrade or Super.com or Shopify, in every category of business and entrepreneurship, there unequivocally is a leader that’s based here in Canada. That wasn’t always the case. That is a new phenomenon. The difference, I think, is that thanks to people like you, we’re celebrating those winners. I’m running around telling everyone who will listen to me how amazing Dominion is, or how amazing Ada is, or how amazing Wealthsimple is, because I believe they’re genuinely amazing. That is a new phenomenon here in Canada, where we all celebrate each other’s success.”

Investing in ONE9 while defence was still taboo

“Nobody cared about defence in 2022. But I got a chance to meet Glenn and Mike and the founders, and I was like, these guys are going to build something incredible. They come from industry. Glenn served in the forces. That type of context, plus that type of conviction, I love betting on people like that.”

Becoming too good to ignore

“We had something on our wall in the early days of Shopify. It said, ‘Do things. Tell people.’ Canadians have always been incredibly good at doing things. You look at Nortel, you look at RIM, you look at these amazing companies. We’re good at building stuff. We have not always been good at the tell-people side of it. We have to be louder about what we’re doing and celebrate each other.

The second thing that I think is super important is that we have to shed the perspective that ‘If I’m living in Ottawa, I have to raise money from an Ottawa VC.’ No. Shopify’s first investors were not Canadian. We thought we were building an amazing product in Ottawa. We looked at who was investing in SaaS at the time. It happened to be Bessemer Venture Partners. We contacted them; they led our Series A and our Series B, and Jeremy Levine from Bessemer is still on our board. That is the lens we have to remove from the Canadian ecosystem: ‘I’m here; I must raise from local people.’ If you’re in Oshawa or Trois-Rivieres or Calgary, and the product or business is ready for funding so you can grow it, go and try to raise from anywhere in the world. Every venture capital firm today is geographically agnostic. Some of it is just getting over ourselves. The more we talk about success, the more we have role models. I’m hoping one day Shopify will be one of those role models. Maybe we are already. It gives other people hope. You cannot become something that you don’t see.”

Canadian founders staying in Canada

We need to do things and tell people; we have to have more role models here. I meet with a group of entrepreneurs, founders of some of the most important private companies here in Canada. The discussion is around how to become large-scale independent companies, whether that’s through an IPO or some other financing model. And they want to stay here. I was born in Canada. I grew up in the U.S. It would have been really easy for me to move back to the U.S. I want to be in Canada.

I think Canada is the best place to live and the best place to raise a family. There’s a joie de vivre. There’s an energy in this country and a culture that is - especially in Montreal, my favourite city in the whole world. I think you can build world-class companies from here.”

Reversing brain drain

“Be too good to ignore. That’s an easy one. Make your company so good that no one wants to go to someone else’s company. Shopify is not competing with another Canadian company for talent. We’re competing with every company in the world. We’re competing with NVIDIA. We’re competing with Apple. We’re competing with OpenAI and Amazon.

Our job is to be so good that people still want to work at Shopify. It’s not to lament that it’s easier somewhere else, or taxes, or bullshit. Be too good to ignore. Not just from an ambition, customer, client, or product perspective, but also as an employer. Make your employer brand so strong that people want to work for you and are willing to move to Canada to work for you. We are creating a reverse brain drain at Shopify, where people are leaving their countries in Europe and the U.S. and moving here. We need more of that.”

Building globally from Canada

“If you can build a global company from Canada and live in Canada, it is the best setup possible. As someone who lived in the U.S., there’s no place I’d rather live.

In 2026, you do not have to be in any one particular location to build your company. You can be anywhere you want. Yes, you have to take trips down to the Valley from time to time to have meetings. You have to go to VivaTech in Europe to meet companies there as well. You can travel around. I still travel 100 nights a year, but I’m doing it while being based here in Canada. I’m very proud of that.”

A new era of Canadian entrepreneurship

“Brand Canada is the best it’s ever been. In my view, we have a prime minister who’s super supportive. The mayor of Montreal just came onstage with me. I meet with her fairly regularly. All she asks is, ‘How can I help?’ I’ve never had that before. No mayor, no politician ever asked me that. Now everyone’s asking, ‘How can I help?’ I think we’re in this new era of Canadian business and entrepreneurship, and I think it’s going to be the most glorious one ever.”

If you’re building something in Canada, I want to hear about it: contact@ethanmarcoux.com

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Building Bloc Systems is developing a decentralized platform for medical manufacturing, designed to make production faster and cheaper in austere environments such as war zones, disaster response, remote and low-resource communities, post-conflict recovery, and the Arctic. The company is assembling factories which can produce medical devices, consumables, surgical instruments, and replacement parts at the point of care, where a custom prosthetic can be produced in as little as 22 minutes. This reduces the need to predict and ship every item frontline healthcare teams may require. Its hardware can range from suitcase-sized field units to ruggedized container factories and permanent manufacturing facilities.

Building Bloc is working with Ukraine’s Ministry of Veterans Affairs on a proposed network of prosthetics manufacturing sites. It estimates that four factories could add capacity for approximately 15,000 prosthetics per year.

Founded in 2024, the team is led by CEO and founder Dr. Harvey Hawes, an experienced trauma surgeon with 20 years in trauma care and health-system development across Canada’s North, Fiji, and East Africa. He currently works clinically as a civilian trauma surgeon and serves as Provincial Trauma Medical Director for British Columbia. He describes Building Bloc as the “factory that builds factories that build products.”

I spoke with Hawes about rebuilding medical supply chains, designing a company for both defence and civilian healthcare, and manufacturing what patients need where they need it.

In one sentence, what is Building Bloc building?

“We’re building a decentralized platform for regulated medical-device manufacturing that will allow our customers to have medical-supply certainty.”

When did you realize microfactories had to exist?

“I spent six years as a humanitarian surgeon, working in places that had a lot of donated equipment. There were these massive graveyards of unusable capital that just needed repair. At the time, additive manufacturing was just coming on board, and I started thinking we could rehabilitate this wasted capital and try to solve some of the inequity in healthcare that I was seeing from low-resource centres to high-income countries.

Then I was doing some humanitarian mission work and some combat work, and I was seeing that it’s not the pointy end of the spear all the time. Although funding and interest are going towards defence spending and defence innovation like drones and weapons, what happens after that, or even during prolonged engagements, is really important too for the communities, the civilians, the governments, and the economies after war. Rehabilitating health infrastructure became really interesting to me, both during acute combat operations and in the immediate aftermath. Deploying medical manufacturing specifically geared to rehabilitate health systems was the first real interest I had in this.

Then, as additive and other technologies got better, and software became easier to integrate, I started thinking about the real supply chain: actually making the stuff that you need to provide healthcare anywhere in the world, to really get over those inequities that I was seeing. It came full circle back to more of a humanitarian aspect, but certainly it touches on disaster management and defence, which I believe in.”

How does it work? What can it manufacture, and at what scale?

“We’re designing very small, agile, mobile, almost suitcase-sized manufacturing systems that, with the right software and training on top of them, could make some medical devices or repair equipment in the field. That’s really the use case for the very agile units or for supporting special forces operations.

Then we can scale up to standard shipping-container-sized units. Those can make medical-device consumables, surgical instruments, and things that you need in remote or austere environments for the types of medicine that you need to perform there. They can make about 75 percent of what’s needed to really cut down on medical-supply-chain complexity. You just need to ship precursor material, and you can make many different things from a digital catalogue, versus trying to package everything you think you need.

Those facilities can make thousands of parts per day. You can support operations at a small- to mid-sized mobile health facility, maybe disaster response or a Role 2 NATO-style facility. That’s the deployable side. They don’t have to be containerized, mobile, or agile. They can be on factory floors, and you can design bespoke factories to do high-volume, more traditional manufacturing as well.

The software is the key that links it all together. It orchestrates multiple units around the world into a supply chain. You can do things like load balancing, sensing, and demand matching. It’s designed to be scalable. It’s the same platform, but the location, size, scale, and intended use change.”

Is the containerized platform the main product offering?

“It was the main initial product offering, for sure. But as we understood our customers more, not only defence customers but the civilian market as well, onshoring sovereign manufacturing for healthcare in Canada is a big deal. We import 70 percent of our medical devices here, and most countries import at least that much, some of them more. Being able to produce at a national scale is really important, and our system lends itself to that. Remote, rural, and Arctic places would need more of the containerized, ruggedized footprints that we have.

3D printing is just one modality of manufacturing. Any digitally controlled manufacturing process can be incorporated into our software system. The main focus of the company is to build that integrated software system, put digital work instructions into it, put training and regulatory management into it, and orchestrate multiple units across geographies.

3D printing is a natural fit because, with a limited number of feedstocks such as resins or filaments, you can print thousands of different things. It’s a lever that you can use for manufacturing. It’s not the best manufacturing method, nor do we think it’s going to be the only one we use long-term, but it’s one of the tools we use. There are many others. The company is software-first, with hardware to be integrated. That could be on-table injection moulding, extrusion, or CNC. When you combine those modalities, you can make quite a bit, pretty quickly.”

Where is the technology today?

“We started the company in December 2024, so we’re fairly new. We’ve built our first factory that’s making our first factory. We’re a factory that builds factories that build products.

Our first factory is in Burnaby, B.C., and we’re building our prototype containerized unit for demonstration and validation. Our medical-supply manufacturing product is at technology readiness level 6 (TRL 6) right now. When we deploy and validate, which we’re planning to do in the winter with civilian use cases in Northern B.C., we’ll hit TRL 8 at that point. That will be the unit that we go around and show to defence customers and healthcare customers.

We have another deployment opportunity in East Africa that’s being developed. That will be the same kind of thing in a different country, to validate it in a different context. One of the projects we’re developing is a network of mobile prosthetics clinics and factories for Ukraine and other countries. We’ve been working with the Ukrainian government on designing the system. The mobile prosthetics clinic and factory system is currently at TRL 8, and the first unit could be in-country within nine months of an order.”

What does the MOU with Ukraine’s Ministry of Veterans Affairs cover?

“During the Invictus Games in Vancouver last year, one of our champions in government invited the Minister of Veterans Affairs from Ukraine and the ambassador’s office to visit us in Vancouver as part of their tour. Ukraine was showcased at the Invictus Games. We understood the need for prosthetics. I trained as a war surgeon, and I know that amputation rates are incredibly high right now in Ukraine. From the modern face of war, it’s more of a maiming war than a killing war. If soldiers or civilians have amputations and don’t get prosthetics early, then they are placed on the sidelines or become a burden to their families or the economy. With new prosthetic technologies, it’s possible to provide prosthetics early, manufacture them at scale, and manufacture them custom. Traditionally, they’re hand-formed. People have to wait several months, if not a year, in some places in Ukraine, to get a prosthetic. If they get them late and the limb has atrophied, they don’t have the same functional outcome.

Using 3D scanning and 3D printing for portions of the prosthetic, you can do it quite rapidly: taking a six-month waiting list and turning it into one day, where you see the patient, scan the patient, fit the patient with the prosthetic, and get them on the road to recovery essentially right after they leave the hospital from their amputation. That’s going to have better functional outcomes and better economic outcomes for Ukraine. When they came to visit us in Vancouver, we made them a custom prosthetic in 22 minutes and handed it to them. They said, “This is the kind of thing that we need. How many can you make?” We designed our system to double the annual prosthetics capacity in Ukraine at the time, which was about 15,000 prosthetics per year. We could add 15,000 prosthetics with four of our factories deployed.

We can move our factories around. One of the struggles they have is access for patients who live in the east. Travelling across the country is challenging, especially if you’re a new amputee. Being able to move the facilities where they’re needed was of great importance to the minister. They liked what we were doing, and we chose to explore it further. We have an MOU that is basically to develop the system and seek funding support to deploy it. We’re going through the Canadian government’s available Ukraine-assistance funds. We think this would be a great way for Canada to support Ukraine without sending weapons or drones, but by helping with the rebuild and helping civilians and soldiers get back to life. We’re very close to that. I think we’re likely to have significant support from the Canadian government and be able to bring this to Ukraine to have a real impact there: a Canadian-led innovation and an all-Canadian team delivering something for the citizens of Ukraine.

How is a defence customer different from a civilian healthcare customer?

“There are some similarities. Civilian healthcare around disaster management and disaster response is probably the most similar to the defence customer base. Defence expeditionary forces and responding to an earthquake or wildfire are, from a logistical standpoint, similar. But civilian healthcare is very restricted in terms of dollars. The adoption barriers in the civilian healthcare world are very different from those in defence.

Defence, especially nowadays, is much more innovative and much more willing to change as they see the face of war changing quickly and looks for solutions to adapt. We see the synergy for a company like ours that’s dual-use from the outset. We’re not a dual-use company that’s dabbling in defence or dabbling in another thing. We were built that way from the beginning. Leveraging the defence spend and the defence-innovation drive that we’re seeing now, then building off that to showcase a more advanced product to healthcare, which is much slower to change, is really important. That should help us gain adoption in healthcare.

Then that cycle will come back to military medicine as well. As healthcare adopts it and physicians are trained on it and start to understand it better, those physicians go into the military and naturally bring the technologies they want with them. This could be one of those. We see it as a circle.”

What’s one trait you think a founder needs to succeed in this market?

“Be a glutton for punishment. It’s horrible. This is not consumerism. This is not building an app. Both aspects of what we do are highly regulated.

Regulation, probably rightly so, scares off a number of startups because it is complex. But it’s also deterministic. You can understand the regulation and solve for it. It’s really a documentation and engineering challenge. If you’re willing to be patient with it and build that in from the outset, then it’s no different from any other challenge that a startup faces. The real struggle, and it’s changing but hasn’t quite changed yet, is adoption, funding, and procurement. You hear that from every startup, and they’re probably the worst in defence and healthcare.

You have to be in it for the long haul. You probably need the right connections from the get-go, or need to find people with the right connections who believe in your product. Otherwise, trying to be a startup and sell to healthcare, governments, and defence is really, really hard. I think mostly impossible.”

What’s the biggest obstacle preventing you from scaling right now?

“Just capital.

I’ve worked in the U.S.; I spent some time in the U.S. and trained in the U.S. as a physician. It’s not where I want to focus my efforts or innovation. From a pure business standpoint, if I were in this company to make money, then obviously I would have gone to the U.S. a while ago, raised money, and worked in that market.

But I really want to build capacity for Canada. I think Canada could be an innovative country. It’s moving in that direction. We see the need, and we seem to have this new nationalism, in a healthy way, that shows we have what it takes to succeed in the global market. I want to be part of that.

It’s not about politics or what’s currently happening south of the border. Building up Canada’s innovation ecosystems is where my heart lies. We’ll stay here, but it’s also hard because we don’t have the capital infrastructure. The innovative spirit is slowly coming around, but it’s not there yet. The adoption and government-procurement cycles are very limiting.

Those are the barriers. But the promise is that we’re a highly educated country and very diverse. We see needs globally, outside of just the neighbour to the south. Products that address global concerns are often supported by the federal government; that’s a big plus for me because I came from a humanitarian-surgery background, and that was why I started this company. I don’t think I would have gotten that in the U.S.”

What do the next 12 months look like for Building Bloc?

“Continuing to build out the proof point. The R&D is largely settled. We’ve addressed the major hurdles and the regulatory hurdles. We have a roadmap to finish the software and the demonstration units. It is such a foundational change in the way healthcare systems work. Typically, you procure what you need from distributors and large manufacturers. If you need a repair part, you put in a request and wait three or four months.

What we’re saying is that you don’t have to do that anymore. If you need something, you take it off the shelf, and our system replenishes that stock. If something is broken, you make the repair part on site within a day.

It’s a new way of thinking. Healthcare systems don’t understand that. It’s not really in their lexicon to manufacture what they need. Showing that this is simple, easy to use, guided, and safe is the hurdle to adoption. That’s what we’re doing in the next year: building those demonstration models to show that this is something they can do.”

What is one other Canadian national-interest startup worth watching?

“I mentioned Sentinel R&D, but the other one that really interests me, and it’s also local to B.C., is FireSwarm. It’s another real dual-use company that has a great civilian impact. They build super-heavy-lift drones that carry water and can service wildfires almost autonomously. It’s incredible. Those airframes, that use case, and targeting it with surveillance systems and multiple data sources are really cool. I like what they’re doing. The list that you have includes many of those companies. I think they’re great too.”

If you’re building something in Canada, I want to hear about it. contact@ethanmarcoux.com

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ENVGO is a marine technology startup founded in 2021. Its core team came from Aeryon Labs, an early drone industry innovator acquired by FLIR Systems in 2019. In June 2025, ENVGO raised a C$2.7-million seed round to build the NV1, an electric hydrofoil boat that uses retractable foils to lift the hull out of the water, reducing drag and improving efficiency.

Now, ENVGO is shifting its focus to Canadian defence and public safety, building autonomous, intelligent micro-USVs (Unmanned Surface Vessels) for rapid response, persistent ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance), and maritime domain awareness.

ENVGO’s next platform is the XV2, a six-foot-long, hand-launchable, electric and autonomous boat to keep personnel out of dangerous or contested waters. It is designed to produce a lower wake and reduce visual, thermal, and acoustic signatures. The team is currently engaging with the Canadian Coast Guard and Royal Canadian Navy to discover which new capabilities this technology can unlock, including anti-submarine sensing.

I spoke with Mike Peasgood, ENVGO’s CEO and co-founder, about building a new class of defence vessels, transferring aerial autonomy to the water, and what Canadian founders need to understand before entering defence.

What is ENVGO building, and why does it matter for Canada?

“ENVGO is building a critical piece of a maritime defence shield, which is necessary for Canada because we’ve got the longest coastline of any country in the world. Defending that is becoming a bigger and bigger priority as the world order changes.”

What did you build with NV1, and how did it lead to the XV2?

“What we built with NV1 was a really unique capability in a high-performance, zero-emissions, futuristic and very intelligent boat. It feels more like an airplane than a boat because it flies over the surface of the water on a hydrofoil.

What we realized was that this has a huge value proposition in the defence space for very different reasons, but using the same technology. That high speed gives us a rapid-response capability with a small vessel, which you can’t normally achieve without a much bigger craft. Which means we can apply more of them and build a fleet of small systems that can respond really quickly compared with conventional craft.

The other big piece that we’re taking away from NV1 is autonomy capability: the ability to be aware of its surroundings and respond intelligently. We’ve now built an uncrewed variant of NV1, which can be remotely piloted by somebody who doesn’t have to be on board. We’re packaging that now into the small XV2, which lets us remotely control it and keep the crew out of harm’s way. The fact that we can package all of that into a small platform that can also operate in really big sea states is what sets us apart. It’s using all of that capability that we’ve built in hydrofoiling, clean technology, and electric drivetrains, which now gives us a quiet response. The high-speed autonomy delivers ISR, eyes-on-target capabilities from a really small package.”

What benefit does the hydrofoil deliver for USVs?

“The hydrofoil enables fast and efficient transport over the water, and it provides a smooth platform for EO/IR (Electro-Optical/Infrared) cameras and sensors. The initial motivator was really around the speed of response and capabilities in larger water. We can get about four times the distance and range on an electric, battery-powered craft than we could with a conventional boat. That enables a response out to 100 kilometres of range instead of 25 for an equivalent battery size. That opens up a whole lot more capabilities for our hundreds of thousands of kilometres of coastline that we need to cover. With a rapid response, we can move up to 25 knots, which would burn an immense amount of power on a conventional craft. That’s the enabler. The hydrofoil also lets us surf over really big waves, getting ourselves into big sea states which would swamp a normal craft. We’re bringing that capability to surf up and over and down the other side of those waves to maintain a high-speed response.”

What can small uncrewed vessels do that larger vessels cannot?

“One of the key things we’re able to bring is a distributed capability: many small craft. That is not possible when you’ve got larger vessels, where you need the larger vessel because you’ve got people inside it. By using small unmanned craft, we can create, for example, a distributed array of underwater sensors which can do anti-submarine warfare sensing, which you can’t do with a manned craft. You can’t do it with larger craft because you want to spread a lot of sensors around a large area and have them all listening and collaborating together.

Another one is a meshed, distributed network for resilient communications. That’s just not possible with a single craft. You need a fleet of small vessels which can distribute a communications mesh network across a large area. Supplying that capability is uniquely possible with small unmanned vehicles.”

How is the experience from Aeryon Labs being leveraged?

“I was a co-founder of Aeryon Labs, and we were building small drones back in 2007, before drones were really a thing. We got really, really good at system integration, at flight control especially, and at building lightweight ISR systems which are easy to use.

We’re repackaging all of that for the marine space. The flight-control skills that we built up in that team apply directly to the hydrofoiling capabilities and high-speed transit. Aerodynamics translates directly to hydrodynamics. The ISR capabilities transfer directly in terms of building stabilized platforms for EO/IR cameras.”

What are the lessons from bridging civilian technology to defence?

“One of the big takeaways is there’s a lot of value, especially in the Canadian market, in building a dual-use company because it lets you leverage those two markets to their different benefits.

The commercial and industrial markets can buy more quickly, while defence has a longer procurement cycle but greater stability once you’re in it. It lets you ride through the ups and downs that you might get in the consumer and industrial markets. Being able to smooth out and balance those different business cycles is really valuable.

On the supply-chain side, there’s a challenge because there are different requirements for defence versus consumer or industrial applications: requirements for building in Canada, for building with a fully sovereign supply chain. The challenge that comes along with that model is that we need to effectively build maybe two different supply chains to fulfill those two different needs. The defence market needs that sovereign capability, which might cost more or have different timelines, but there are different priorities for that customer.”

Navigating procurement

“It’s a process, and it helps to understand the procurement process to be able to work through it. There are definitely efforts and high-level strategies to make it faster and easier, but it’s going to take time for those to roll out. Working with the systems that are there, ISED (Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada) provides funding for early-stage trials of technology, which is at the prototype stage but not yet commercialized, called ISC (Innovative Solutions Canada).

We work through ISC funding, for example, to collaborate with a partner organization in the government that wants to purchase our technology early on. ISC will help fund that, and that then enables future procurement to happen much faster.

We’re working with DIANA (Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic), which is the NATO organization that is supporting development in defence innovation. That also provides some funding, but more importantly, it gets us exposure in the rest of the NATO countries, which would be aiming to leverage our technology in the same space. We need to do that so we can build a bigger base of customers beyond just the Canadian government.

It really depends on an international strategy, starting with Canadian innovation funding, building that through to validation with the end customer, then moving that into a procurement cycle through the Canadian government while, at the same time, building an international market for the same technology.”

Advice to other dual-use founders

“The biggest one is: talk to the end customers as much as you can, as early as possible, through organizations like COVE, DIANA, and ABCDMI (Association of British Columbia Defence and Marine Industries). Really understand what their challenges are in terms of the procurement process they need to go through from their side. What does it take for them to be able to buy what you’re selling? And what are you providing that uniquely targets the requirements they have?”

How directly are you working with operators, and how do you generate product fit?

“It comes down to, like any good business-development project, understanding the needs of your customer really, really well, and then working with them on solving their end-use problem rather than just building one cool piece of technology. What is the rest of their infrastructure that they need to be able to plug this into? What is the rest of their networking infrastructure? What are their CONOPS (Concept of Operations)? In our case, what kind of ships do they need to be able to carry these on and deploy them from? How are they going to get them back onto the ships?

It’s working through all of the actual use cases and their challenges, then including them in the design exercise so those requirements get in early and we don’t show up to the table with what we think is a fully baked product, but have missed some of their key requirements.”

Manufacturing and Interoperability

“[Scalable manufacturing] is just going to be a necessity. Right now, we’re starting to build out that network of Canadian vendors who can help build this. One of the big messages that I’m getting is that it needs to be manufacturable wherever we are and easily repairable. And it’s got to plug into whatever other gear we’ve got. There’s been so much development of new tech in isolation that I hear the end user is really frustrated. It’s like, “I don’t need another widget. I need a widget that can plug into the rest of the infrastructure that I’ve already got.” It’s got to plug into my network system. It’s got to talk to my ATAK (Android Team Awareness Kit) console. It’s got to talk to my existing WAVE radios; otherwise I can’t actually use it. Thinking about all of those end-user requirements as we’re building and designing is critical.”

What are ENVGO’s plans for the next 12 months?

“The real goals are to build that relationship with the end customer and demonstrate capabilities, open up their eyes to what’s actually possible, and start building that integrated solution for the final operational capability they need rather than just the cool piece of technology. It is taking that hydrofoiling platform and starting to build on the sensors, whether they’re IR sensors, communications networks, or underwater acoustic sensors; building on the communications-link network capabilities they need; and tying into their existing infrastructure.”

What is one other Canadian national-interest startup worth watching?

“I would definitely keep an eye on Dominion Dynamics. I think Eliot is doing an awesome job of setting a high bar for the rest of the community to step up to.”

Why build in Canada?

“For me, I was born here. I’m going to stay here, and we need to defend this country. We’ve got some amazing talent to do it, so let’s have at it.”

If you’re building something in Canada, I want to hear about it. contact@ethanmarcoux.com

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On June 16, Marconi announced it had been selected, alongside Polish defence integrator Enamor International, to deliver Orion X650 tactical radios to the Polish military. The contract supports Poland’s defence modernization under the EU’s Security Action for Europe, or SAFE, a €150 billion defence procurement and lending instrument.

Canada is the first non-European country to participate in SAFE. Marconi is now the first Canadian company to win business under the agreement.

I spoke with Marconi CEO Alain Cohen about what this means for Canadian defence exports and how Marconi plans to work with Canadian startups and SMBs.

What is Marconi?

“Last month, in May, we basically carved out the division that I was running at Ultra I&C, which is a defence and dual-use company. We carved out the Tactical Communications division. That means our operations that were already here in Montreal, designing, developing, and manufacturing Orion radios and Archer troposcatter terminals, as well as our UK business located in Tring, which was manufacturing Hunter SATCOM terminals, will be coming under one brand name.”

How significant is this SAFE contract for the Canadian defence market?

“For us, the SAFE contract is a big one because Poland is a really strategic market. It's our second win in Poland, but definitely the first one where our products are being pulled through SAFE funding with the Polish partner. And yes, it was the first one for a Canadian company, so that's really exciting. We were really grateful for the support of the Canadian government, trade commissioners, Global Affairs Canada, and the defence attachés as well. It's really a team effort when it comes to exporting defence and dual-use products. What it does for us is that it lands our very latest-generation tactical radio with a very good client and customer who is very sophisticated on the Eastern Front.

We look forward to more opportunities being created through SAFE for other Canadian exporters, too. We're pulling along the supply chain with us, as the announcement mentioned.”

What must a Canadian founder understand before selling into Europe?

“First of all, nothing substitutes for going on the ground and seeing for yourself. If you're a startup leader or entrepreneur, you've got to hear the client firsthand. You've got to walk a few days in their shoes. In the defence industry, you literally do that by going out in the field and seeing where the problems are and what needs to be solved. You need to develop that end-user empathy very deeply. Once you do that, a European client will see that you're invested, personally keen to solve their problems, and responsive. That's where a relationship begins, and that does matter.

Finding a local partner is the next most important thing. You cannot do it alone. Some markets are very idiosyncratic. Some have complex and specific acquisition rules subject to that jurisdiction. You need trustworthy local partners who can help you navigate, are technically competent, and are credible with the end user. I'd say that's the second thing that matters most.

The third is knowing that the Government of Canada has really stepped up. We're seeing our government take a whole-of-government approach. Trade commissioners, defence attachés, and embassies are great resources to help Canadian entrepreneurs when there is a good market fit. There will be forums and opportunities like sponsored trade shows. You don't need a huge booth to be present, but getting known through those forums does spark conversations with potential local clients.”

What relationship does Marconi want with Canadian startups?

“Partnering with startups is absolutely something we do. I’ll share a personal story. Last night I was working at a coffee shop until about 11 o’clock. I was walking home, and somebody pinged me from California, a Canadian expat in his late twenties developing a really cool counter-UAS technology, but thinking of entering the Canadian market and looking for help on the communications side. I took the call right away. We’re in touch now, and we’re going to see how we can help them create resilient links for their new products.

We're always open to anything that makes sense, but I know what I'm not looking for right now: a strict supplier-client relationship. I think those are things of yesterday. Sometimes, depending on the tier of the component, you do need a relationship that is more commodity-based, but that's by exception.

What we're looking for are partnerships that push the technology. Our engineers feed on challenge. If a partner, an SME, or a startup comes in and says, "We've got this really cool technology, but we're looking to solve a difficult communications challenge or a data-fusion challenge," we can do that. That's going to push our engineers and keep pushing our engineers. It creates a problem-solving dynamic for both sides, and we feed on that.”

What does Marconi look for in a startup partner?

“There are a few things that will always catch my eye.

The first is: does the startup or new partner introduce a potential new concept of operation that we hadn't thought of before? Basically, is there a new type of application that we can help solve for? That is exciting. It gets us going and accelerates our own roadmaps and technological advantage.

The second thing is: Is there an IP nugget that we haven't developed before? Something where you say, "Wow, that's really clever. I wish we could partner with them, because that plus our thing equals three." That's the IP gap you're looking to fill.

The third one is talent. I love working with really talented people, and my team is the same way. Sometimes it's almost agnostic to what product line or application they're in. If the talent is there, there are always sparks that lead to good outcomes. We like to surround ourselves with partners who can push thinking and unlock things together.”

Why operate in Canada?

“Marconi established a corporation here in 1903, and it was a well-known name in the industry for a very long time until it was sold to foreign interests. I joined five years ago. Bringing this division under Canadian ownership was never going to be a sure-shot outcome. It was just, "At some point, this company will be sold, because that's what investors do with portfolio companies." The question was: wouldn't it be nice if, in addition to finding a good home, that home, from a headquarters and ownership standpoint, was in Canada? That has been a dream for many of the employees in the company, and certainly for me too. We could have sold to another strategic investor. But what an amazing outcome that we brought this back home to Canada.

The underlying theme is that it was a little bit mission-driven, too. We felt like Canada needs some anchors. We have the ambition to grow this company into a globally recognized, Canadian-headquartered and Canadian-owned technology company at scale. Historically, we succeeded as a business, and I'm going to be really frank here, despite being in Canada, while being in the defence industry. We had to be that good from an IP standpoint for clients around the world to come and buy from us. The defence industry can be cyclical. When you're in a trough, sovereign primes in other countries have their home market to fall back on. We never had that. The IP had to be that much better. We will continue using our IP advantage as the number-one differentiator.

We have a purpose and mission to bring the ecosystem along with us. I really do mean that. We'll be exporters, and they'll be re-exporters by virtue of that. Last year, we were still exporting about 90 percent, if not 95 percent, of our revenue. That's a big deal. From an economic-impact standpoint, the multiplier on exports, especially IP-intensive exports, is very high. We're proud of that contribution to the overall economy.

There’s a societal effect around the acceptability of investing in defence. When I worked at Export Development Canada, supporting defence companies was a no-go. It’s a complete 180.”

Are there any particular early-stage companies or startups operating in Canada's national interest that you're watching?

“I want to watch as many of them as I can. I'm inspired by the grit, audacity, boldness, desire to innovate, and desire to build on the competitive advantages we may already have. I've met with rocket companies and companies doing things you never thought were possible here.

My message to you, Ethan, more than an answer, is that what you're doing here is amazing. You are creating awareness and education. My note to the ecosystem and startups is: if you think there is a fit to work together, don't hesitate. We're here, and we want to work with you.

I don't want to call out favourites. What I'll do is name companies I've spoken with very recently. I want to shout out to the team at ARA Robotics. Sentinel as well. I think they're absolutely crushing it, and we look forward to collaborating. There is also a Montreal-based firm with quite a few years under its belt, but it is now picking up and taking off: Octasic. I'm really impressed with how it is breaking through markets in Europe, the United States, and Canada.”

If you’re building something in Canada, I want to hear about it. contact@ethanmarcoux.com

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Many methods of drone defence are either too destructive, too expensive, or too difficult to use in urban environments. Prandtl’s technology is designed to make counter-UAS safe, low-cost, and non-lethal. The core system, Dome, emits pulses of inaudible ultrasound that cause a drone’s electronic and mechanical components to vibrate and produce detectable sound, revealing a hidden drone before it is ever powered on.

I asked Parth Mahendru, CEO and co-founder of Prandtl Dynamics, a few questions about acoustic counter-UAS technology, manufacturability, and what it takes to build a national-interest company in Canada.

In one sentence, what is Prandtl building, and why?

“We are building a non-lethal acoustic sensing and counter-drone system that is low-cost enough to be deployed in real-world conditions, including critical infrastructure, utilities, and first responders. Airspace and critical infrastructure have typically been left exposed, and nobody is building the right tools to protect them.”

Why acoustics? What can sound do that other counter-UAS systems cannot?

“We started as a student team. We wanted to do something interesting, and we thought that drones were a big threat. Why not make something to protect against those threats? Because anyone can fly a drone.

The reason why we chose acoustics is out of necessity. Back then, we were looking at solutions, and there were nets. We did not have access to nets, nor a net-throwing mechanism. There were lasers. We had no access to lasers either. We didn’t have missiles. We didn’t have microwave tech. We did disassemble a microwave, on the other hand, though, as a fun project to use it as a directed energy source. All of these are stupidly expensive. They’re pretty much impossible to do unless you have the infrastructure built.

Then we looked at sound. Sound is more ubiquitous. It’s easier to produce. It’s easier to obtain. It’s easier to use. And it’s also safe. So the reason why we chose sound is the fact that it can work in any condition.

Sound is non-lethal. Even our tech that defeats these drones is non-lethal. And that’s core to what we build. It is safe technology that we mean for everyone to use to protect them against these threats. Our tech only works on machines; it doesn’t really work on humans. We don’t really care what we’re protecting, but we’re protecting it in a safe way. Even if there’s a human person or a living organism in the middle, they’re not going to be affected.

How did you discover sound could do this, and how does the product work?

“One of the co-founders, Anna, is a materials scientist, and in her work, she uncovered that there’s a big formula between sound, electric field, and magnetic field. There’s a tensor that exists. Basically, that means there’s a relationship.

Because drones have electronics on them, they have all these PCBs, the boards, they have electrical signals, and all these sorts of data processing units, like speed motor controllers, IMU, stability control. What we do is we selectively target a cluster of electronics, and we blast them with high-powered sound, and it’s not just high-powered sound. We blast this sound in a very particular and controlled manner so that we’re able to excite internal electronics to fail in a particular way.

Meaning we shoot high-powered sound at a drone, which is a dynamically changing sound beam that we produce. And it’s able to push the drone back or make it fall to the ground. I would also admit that the use case for this is niche. It’s a significantly lesser range than, say, a machine gun, a microwave or a laser system. But that’s not the intention of our tech. It’s not the intention to replace the system. Our tech is a supplementary add-on, which is a non-lethal piece of machinery that you can hand off to anyone to defeat drones.

An interesting thing we do is selectively spoof the drone’s cameras. Meaning the drone stays where it is, but the camera is spoofed, which helps with ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) purposes, like surveillance.”

What is one thing people misunderstand about counter-UAS?

“The typical thing people misunderstand is that one solution kills all. Counter-UAS is a very sophisticated problem with a lot of ifs and buts about it. One solution can realistically never fit all scenarios. You need different systems and systems of systems.

When people are complaining about a system from, say, RWS, remote weapon systems guys, the people who have the machine guns on the turrets, and they claim, “Oh, you can never use this in urban environments or in a city,” they’re correct on paper. But the use case is much more defined. It’s more detailed, and it’s not as easy as it sounds. Maybe you would want an RWS, a remote weapon system, somewhere around your perimeter, which is in a rural area, for example, and you’d want something non-lethal, like acoustic systems, in a city.

You can’t realistically use our acoustic system over kilometres. The range just doesn’t work that way. But an RWS does that. That doesn’t necessarily mean that one is better than the other. What’s going to be even better is all of them working together as a system of systems.”

What’s the biggest problem preventing early-stage companies like yours from scaling?

“Honestly, I’ve seen a lot of companies succeed. What they have, and where we’re trying to do better, is manufacturability.

This is something that I feel is missing. Companies typically outsource manufacturing and are left only doing high-level design. So when it actually comes to producing at scale, the typical answer is, “Oh, get it made from somewhere else.” But if you’re working in a sensitive field where people are trusting you with their data, you need to ensure that whatever you produce is top quality and it’s something you can stand behind.

In that sense, building your own tech, which is something that we’re starting to do more of, we’re producing more units every month for all of our product lines. That’s why I think it’s problematic for smaller companies: understanding the difference between prototyping and manufacturability. That is a very key thing that took us a while to get.”

Balancing in-house manufacturing with partnerships.

“Definitely leveraging the capabilities of your allies is huge. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel if it already exists. Manufacturability, as I said, is supremely important. But it’s not necessary to make everything yourself. It is necessary to understand your logistics, to understand where your components are coming from.

What happens when one mine in China that makes neodymium closes down for a week? What happens to you? Understanding supply chain risks, logistics, and making sure that you can build stuff yourself, especially for sensitive applications like aerospace, defence, and drones. Definitely takes getting used to if you’re coming from software, SaaS or commercial hardware.

We’re also getting all our PCBs and all our electronics made in-house. We have people in our facility genuinely just screwing things together, making it. That speaks to something. And yes, that does command a more premium price than getting everything made in China. But I think we’d rather have that for a sensitive application: build everything in-house, made in Canada, made in North America, however you want to phrase it. That is not just important for sovereign building capability, but also for your own supply chain and logistics from a practical point of view.”

What’s one trait you think a founder needs to succeed in this market?

“What I genuinely believe is that for anyone to succeed in anything, you just have to be annoying with what you want and be persistent about getting it. I think persistence and perseverance. Those are two qualities that I live by. Just persistence and perseverance.”

What do the next 12 months look like for Prandtl?

“Right now, we’re deploying our tech in universities and airports to protect against these drones. Most of this tech is for detection purposes. We’re not yet selling our defeat capability. Those are being demoed to friendly allied countries and nations, and we’re selling or leasing out a few units to them for defeating drones, but not everyone wants to shoot down drones. Sometimes you just want to know if there is a drone in your airspace, and you can contact the authorities. We are making systems that are ultra-low-cost, made in Canada, that you can use to create a mesh network of sensors and protection around your facility. We’re eventually heading to more critical infrastructure, like power grids, nuclear plants, and data centers.

We hope to soon be around 600 units deployed in total, with over 150 to 200 different deployments. We’re going to continue going from there, protecting against drones using sound as one modality. We’re also making tech that I can’t talk about for the DND, for the DOD, for other allied defence countries, which corresponds to dismounted protection, meaning protecting a person against drones, like a soldier against drones.

We’re making all sorts of form factors in that tech, but that’s the law enforcement government side of things. We’re also expanding into the commercial sector over the next 12 months. I think we’ll have a decent foothold in the commercial sector for protecting against drones with sound, because it’s a very private, very simple modality. You’re not peeping into other people’s windows. So regulations are also more relaxed, and people genuinely need a system to protect against drones. As you see from FIFA, I guess two people got arrested, one for flying their drones over a stadium. We’re going to continue seeing things like this. The need to protect your critical infrastructure, or your house, or even a school, from these unauthorized drones that could be carrying out just about anything will become of paramount importance.”

What feedback are you hearing from customers?

“We have one customer specifically in Northern BC and Alaska. We’ve deployed our sensors over, I think, a 30-kilometre perimeter, our mesh network sensors, and we’re protecting against small and large drones.

We’re detecting all sorts of things over there because our tech is modular, meaning we can detect drones, planes, animals, and illegal mining equipment. And that is very important for this end user.

We’re getting feedback. They just want more things. They want more features. They want more detection capabilities. They want to detect birds. Some of them want to detect fires. Some of them wanted a phone app. So we also built an iPhone app for this purpose, to check on your deployments. Some of them also wanted features to record just the noise level, which is mostly in airports. They want to know how loud it gets so that they have an audit trail to protect against any sort of claims afterwards, to say that we were consistently below this sound level. The general feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. That’s why we’re expanding so much into the commercial sector, and not just the military sector.”

What’s the range?

“It depends on the size of the drone and on which sensor you have. Our cheapest sensor is called Bennu. It can detect drones. Typically, a hundred meters out in radius, 360 degrees. That is, I’m talking about a very small drone, like a less than 250 gram drone that you don’t need a license to fly.

A bigger FPV drone can be detected at over double the range of the sub-250g drone. And you can push that even more for larger airplanes and fixed wings. For example, a Cessna we can detect from a multi-kilometre range before it comes into sight and after it’s gone out of sight. Something like a Boeing 767, 747, we have that at a few multi-kilometre ranges as well. Not that you need to detect big airplanes, but surprisingly, drones like the Shaheds and these larger fixed-wing aircraft sound very similar to Cessnas because they’re approximately the same size.”

What other Canadian national-interest startups are worth watching?

“I’m going to say OBJEXIS AI. Those guys are very cool. They’re doing some very cool things. They’re veteran-led, which means a lot. The CEO is a good friend of mine. His tech was genuinely impressive. He came second with us in Sandbox 2025. I think that is one we need to look out for.

That is one company to look at. We might be working together with them. We’ll see.”

Why build in Canada?

“I think Canada is very conducive to growth and to new companies. It doesn’t shush you away when you need support. And it is a healthy place to build. It is not a cesspool of 500 different startups doing the same thing and just killing your idea.

People are genuinely helpful. It’s about the Canadian spirit, and it shows in not just the way we do things, but how we operate and how we treat others. That means a lot to me, being grounded in morals and ethics, that’s reflected in how we do business.

I can personally appreciate that because that’s also how we build. We’re working with universities and high schools. We’re doing some upskilling programs. We’re getting high schoolers. We’re teaching them how to solder. We’re teaching them how to build components, understand PCB layouts, and all of these things, which is something that we felt university didn’t teach us, or high school didn’t teach us.

This is one of the schools, and they were so happy that we taught a few of their students how to solder, 3D CAD modelling, and engineering design. They gave us this certificate of appreciation. It’s the culture of giving back, which is why we’re building in Canada.”

If you’re building something in Canada, I want to hear about it. contact@ethanmarcoux.com

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ONE9 is Canada’s first national security venture capital firm. It was founded in 2013 by Glenn Cowan, a former JTF 2 (Joint Task Force 2) Squadron Commander in Canada’s special forces. In 2025, ONE9’s venture capital business was acquired by Kensington Capital Partners as its dedicated security and investment platform.

The firm has been operating in Canada’s national interest long before it was mainstream, at a time when investing in defence companies was still heavily restricted across Canada’s venture market. Now, amid an influx of defence funding and geopolitical shifts, ONE9 represents deep expertise in an industry undergoing massive transformation.

Glenn’s view is blunt: founders need customer discovery, investors need domain expertise, and Canada needs to stop playing small.

What is ONE9 building, and why does Canada need it?

“ONE9 is building Canada’s only thematic innovation and investment platform focused on early-stage national security technologies.

We need it because Canada has not traditionally had any funding mechanisms for early-stage companies that want to sell and build in the defence space. Obviously, we’re seeing some of that change, but Canada’s got a lot of talent. We have a requirement to build capable, lethal, relevant, and world-class defence capabilities.”

How does your special operations background shape how you evaluate founders?

“The most direct correlation in how I evaluate founders is the same way I would have evaluated leaders in a special operations community. In my last job in the military, I was the chief instructor at a national mission unit/special forces unit. I ran all the selections, and it was my job to run the leadership courses and select the next generation of leaders. I take a lot of the approaches and thought process and experience from screening leaders, looking at building high-performance teams, and I apply that through the lens that I look at founders with.”

What traits does a founder need to succeed in this market?

“I like audacity, bias for action, and big thinking.”

What does a Canadian startup need to understand before it tries to sell into government or allied markets?

“What we advise and shape our portfolio with is customer discovery. You have to know your customer, understand how to get in front of the customer, and really not just try to sell your tech to them, but understand how a defence end-user actually builds a capability. I think there’s a lot more education that’s needed in terms of working to build a defence tech company in the same way that a military is going to build a force employment concept, and ultimately field the types of technologies.

We’re often seeing people doing it a little bit backwards from how the military thinks. They’re starting with a piece of tech being like, “Oh, this is awesome. I’m going to sell it to the military,” as opposed to saying, “I’m going to work with the customer, really understand the customer, and work backwards through the same sort of process that they innovate and build capability, and then I’ll arrive at the tech. Then we’ll build the tech.” The widget is less important than delivering the effect that the customer is trying to deliver. Militaries want to see effects-based capabilities delivering tangible effects in a specific time and place to yield a specific result. That’s how militaries think. If your company and technology can’t do that, then you need to understand the path to get it there. That’s where I would say customer discovery is more important than the technology you’re trying to build.”

Should dual-use build for defence first?

“I truly do believe that it can go both ways. I am a huge fan of going defence first, whether or not you’re even going to sell to defence. I think it’s important to validate your tech in a defence context. Special operations and a good defence customer are so far ahead of the civilian market in terms of leading indicators and trends of where future innovation and future capability development are happening. They’re literally looking at 30-year horizon scans for things that, if they briefed now, would seem like it’s ridiculous, we’re never going to use that, but 30 years from now, we might. While I’m not suggesting that’s the timeline of a company’s cycle of tech, thinking along the lines of what’s the next thing that militaries are going to need, validate it and ensure it works in that context. Then, if you want to channel it for a commercial application first, I think that’s okay if you can make it work.

Where I think dual-use is dangerous is that so often I hear dual-use means we can sell to both, which is true, but it’s really important to understand the scale of the company and where they’re at in their journey. I tell early-stage companies, pick one and go after it with ruthless precision and discipline. When I did selection for the special forces, I had this motivational poster ingrained in my brain, and it said, “If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.” That burned in my brain. I see dual-use as chasing two rabbits, and if you’re doing it early in a company’s journey, it’s very difficult because there are different investor tolerances, you need different skill sets on the team, you’re going to have a different go-to-market, you’re going to have a different business development function, and you might need a heavier reliance on a government relations function. Pick one and just go after it, and then have a natural, logical, and well-thought-out pivot point when you expand into the other vertical.

Most of these comments are through the lens of pretty early-stage companies, or companies that are brand new to defence. I would articulate them to be very precise in landing that first foothold.”

What's a view that you hold about Canadian defence that most other investors would disagree with?

“It’s a great question, and it’s a moving target because that same question this time last year, I would have said that Canada doesn’t really have a market. We’re seeing this awakening of this defence moment in Canada, which is not new to Canada. We have done this before. Yet Canada played small, and it appears that sentiment is shifting. Canada is playing with the intention of really re-emerging as a sizable, credible, impactful, and relevant country, and a foundational backbone of that is a strong Canadian Armed Forces. Investors and the world are waking up, and they’re like, “Oh, Canada’s a market now.” And it’s a big market. We’re a G7 country that has been playing like we’re a small two-bit player. When Canada decides to turn its mind to something and to get involved and to back something, I find we do it very aggressively. Sometimes it takes time to get there, but it looks like we’re here now.

I’m a bit contrarian, and there are a lot of people who are going to lose money in defence because they’re going to jump on some hype cycle bandwagon and they don’t understand the customer discovery. They don’t understand how militaries think and build. They’re going to try to capitalize on the momentum of this hype that we’re seeing in defence, and they’re just going to throw money after shitty companies that will never sell to a customer. I think investors who don’t have domain expertise in the sector should be investing through someone who does.”

What is the most interesting niche you are looking at?

“I’m really interested in watching these partnerships of necessity form across relevant geographies that are going to be impactful to Canada. I’m watching very closely how the military commitment in Latvia, which is an underappreciated deployment of Canadian forces, is a Canadian bet on the front lines of a very fragile environment. I don’t think we quite appreciate that. We’re going to need to reinforce the 3,500 Canadians that we’ve got on the Russian border, and we’re going to need to push tech, kit, capability, equipment and decentralized decision-making to that group because if that thing kicks off, it’s going to happen real fast. They’re going to be exposed if we don’t arm them, equip them and prepare that group accordingly. The subsequent geography is: follow the Baltic up, we’re seeing a lot with the Nordics, so the Baltic-Nordic alignment. There’s natural alignment with the Canadian Arctic.

We built Sapujjijiit, which is our Inuit defence company out of Iqaluit, to really start to channel tech transfer into these new frontier markets where there is a dual-use application. There are a bunch of other relevant stakeholders, but defence and security are a really underpinning aspect to that geography.

From a technology perspective, we’re very excited, and we’re very heavily invested in counter-UAS. I think that’s a big trend. You have to understand how a customer is going to build a defensive infrastructure. It’s going to be a layered defence. It’s going to have multiple systems, multiple sensors. There’s going to be lots of different options to build out that macro capability of counter-UAS, vital point security or critical infrastructure protection. Understanding how those tech stacks bleed together and how relevant partnerships need to form to create a capability of disparate technologies that are owned by different groupings working together.”

What do the next 12 months look like for ONE9, given the hype in the Canadian market?

“We are growing both arms of our business rapidly. We’re raising a sizable venture fund. I can’t say too much about that, but it’s coming. Not fast enough, but it’s coming.

We’re going to be growing our Capability Labs business. We’re going to be looking to really aggressively support deployment of capital into companies, and then through our Capability Labs business, really aggressively do what we can to create value for the companies that we think are going to be the winners. We’ve got great access to customers. We understand the customer. We can start integrating. We can do a lot of privatized force development through ONE9 Capability Labs. We can test and validate. We can get it in front of customers where there’s a high barrier of entry to that customer. You don’t just walk up to a special forces unit and start asking, “Hey, what are you guys doing? What are you building? What do you need? Where are you guys weak? What are your vulnerabilities?” We have a pretty good handle on that, not just in Canada but with our American counterparts and our British counterparts as well.

When we see the technologies that we think are going to provide solutions for them, I think we have a fairly good roadmap and playbook to channel that right into that customer and get their eyes on it. Get stuff into the hands of these folks that are out there doing the missions. Then do what we can to iterate the feedback loop as quickly as we can so that those companies can course-correct early and cheaply to maximize value for the customer.”

What is one other Canadian national-interest startup that is worth watching?

“North Vector Dynamics. Those guys are going to crush it. The counter-UAS market, I think we’re in the first batter of the first inning of just what is about to unfold with robot wars and drone wars and swarm and all kinds of stuff. I love North Vector because it’s going to play a critical role in layered defence. They’re looking at a problem that’s here and now: drones, and shooting missiles at drones to take them out inexpensively. They’ve solved the cost asymmetry problem, which is the big macro issue in conflict, or one of them.

They’re also approaching it from the other end of the spectrum, looking at that audacious vision of what’s the next thing. The next thing is, how do we take out hypersonics? They’re building counter-hypersonic capability in parallel. They’re moving at different speeds, and there are different time horizons, but they’re hitting the full spectrum of defensive missile capabilities. Canada does not have what’s being called neo-primes. Canada doesn’t have organic companies doing this, so it’s a complete green field.

North Vector Dynamics and Dominion Dynamics are two that I would be watching very closely.”

Building highly exportable technologies

“The other thing I like about North Vector is that they’re building a capability that the Canadian government should be buying and exporting.

I’m a firm believer that the government should not be giving four billion dollars to the Ukrainian government. We should be giving them four million counter-UAS missiles. If we’re going to donate or fund it, let’s keep that money in Canada. Let’s give that to Canadian companies like North Vector, and let’s donate interceptors as opposed to saying here’s a blank check, go do what you want. I look at North Vector, and I see it as a highly relevant, highly exportable Canadian solution that we can push into some of these increasingly challenging areas, like the Baltic / Eastern Europe drone wall that’s being built right now. It’s going to need massive counter-UAS. Middle East, our UAE partners, our Gulf partners, need massive counter-UAS.

China hasn’t even entered the equation yet, but the scale of its drone production puts us all to shame. Things are going to get hairy, man. We’ve got to be prepared. So I love North Vector.

My understanding is that Sentinel R&D is partnering with Airlogix. These are my words, not theirs, but professionalizing the supply chain that’s being built in Ukraine, making the supply chain relevant, domestic manufacturing, using some of her processes and composites. She’s selling to the Government of Canada, who are giving it to the Ukrainians. I think it’s a great playbook.”

Why build in Canada?

“Canada is a great country capable of great feats. We have thought small, so I think there’s a real opportunity where there’s a greenfield market because we have traditionally thought small. We are now seeing some scale, impetus and signal that we’re open for business. The cliche answer would be, "We have great talent.” Sure, we do have great talent. But the reality is, there are so many gaps in the Canadian market because we’ve just ignored it or relied on the United States or other partners to provide it for us.

There’s now accountability and agency over our own military and security systems. It’s a greenfield, go grab it.”

If you’re building something in Canada, I want to hear about it. contact@ethanmarcoux.com

This is one of the first investments made by the Business Development Bank of Canada’s StrongNorth Fund, which launched earlier this year and is investing $300M in 30-40 early-stage Canadian startups over the next four years as part of Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy. StrongNorth plans to add significant capital by leading venture rounds in Canada’s defence and dual-use sector.

I asked the Founder and CEO of Lastwall, Karl Holmqvist, a few questions on the floor of CANSEC about his perspective on this opportunity.

In one sentence, what are you building, and why?

“We are building an identity platform for the resilience era, because the vast majority of attacks generally follow a pattern where somebody uses credentials in the attack chain.”

What’s one trait you think a founder needs to succeed in this market?

“Resilience. I think founders need to be prepared for a lot of change. You can’t quit when something goes bad. You've got to keep going.”

Given the recent funding, what does the next 12 months look like for Lastwall?

“So to unpack that a little bit, we took a different path than a lot of others. We spent a lot of time building capability and product first. So we’re not a young company. We’ve been around for a little while, about a decade. And we built a really amazing platform, but we didn’t want to get to a point where we couldn’t sell it to the regulated markets that we needed. So we went after hard mode first. We went after certification with clients like the U.S. government and the Department of Defense. So now this stage is that we have the established technology that’s proven in the field that can show it can operate in austere, contested environments. We need to scale the go-to-market side of the company. And that’s what this round is about.”

What does this allow you to accomplish?

“So we hit FedRAMP Moderate certification in May 2025, which is a pretty big deal for a company like ours. It allows us to serve any U.S. government agency. But I think it also sends a really strong signal to Canada and other allies that this is technology that can be used in those environments, and it’s suitable for regulated critical infrastructure industries like power or oil and gas, and it also is good for defence or government work. What this allows us to do is continue expanding and growing in the U.S. market. But also, it gives us a chance to help Canada and other nations that are looking at building their sovereign capabilities or building digital defence capabilities to have an alternative option that’s focused on emerging threats and has that sort of capability set that is needed for the next couple of years.”

What other Canadian national-interest startups are worth watching?

“I would say Dominion Dynamics is a really interesting company. What Eliot’s trying to do with that team is quite fascinating. I’d probably also say North Vector Dynamics is really interesting.”

Why build in Canada?

“Well, we are Canadian founders, and we feel like Canada is an amazing place to build. We have deep and smart engineering talent pools. We’ve got a really well-recognized and trusted brand internationally, and we feel like being a Canadian company allows us to not only service the North American defence market, but it also gives us a great platform to export. You know, if you take a Canadian company and you take us abroad, we’re well-liked, and, you know, people respect Canada, and so it makes a really excellent way to get into new markets.”

“This is not a pivot away from the U.S. It’s the next phase of a North American resilience mission […] Lastwall intends to be at the center of the mission to protect our continent, which means helping defend critical systems on both sides of the border.” — Karl Holmqvist, Founder and CEO of Lastwall.

Canada is beginning to see a renewed focus on startups, venture capital, defence, and the national interest. Lastwall, a cybersecurity firm from Fredericton, New Brunswick, which has seen success in the U.S. market, views this as an opportunity to build deeper into Canada.
Canada requires not only the capacity to build generational companies but also to attract them.

If you’re building something in Canada, I want to hear about it. contact@ethanmarcoux.com

Today we stand once again on the Hyphasis. We shall not fear that we have reached the end of the world, for with new technologies, our exploration is just beginning.

Further Beyond

In 1903, The New York Times published a piece predicting that human flight would not be possible for one million to ten million years. Just two months later, the Wright Brothers flew for the first time. It lasted 12 seconds, and only another half-century to reach space.

History is a museum of people who were told their ideas were impossible, yet decided that their vision of the world was so important that they must try.

“The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.” — Sir William Preece, 1876

"Fooling around with alternating current is just a waste of time. Nobody will use it, ever." — Thomas Edison, 1889

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” — Thomas Watson, IBM, 1943.

"By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's." — Paul Krugman, 1998

At the Strait of Gibraltar, it is said that Hercules placed two pillars to mark the edge of the world, inscribed with the warning NON PLUS ULTRA, “nothing further beyond.” In 1516, marking the beginning of the age of exploration, King Charles V of Spain removed the word “non.” Inscribing the national motto of Spain: PLUS ULTRA, or in English: further beyond.

The New Canadian Explorers

“We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.” — John F. Kennedy

New worlds are only found by those foolish enough to search for them.

The founder is the modern explorer. Traversing new domains and expanding the frontier: Into the bottom of Earth’s oceans, up to the Arctic, through the skies, and towards the depths of Space. I asked three Canadian founders what their delusional dream was for their frontier. This is what it means to push the frontier further beyond.

Reaction Dynamics: Bachar Elzein - Space

Reaction Dynamics is a rocket company building hybrid propulsion launch vehicles to enable sovereign access to space.

My “delusional” dream is that access to space becomes as routine and responsive as aviation is today. That any nation, community, or mission can reach orbit when it needs to, without being dependent on someone else’s priorities.

Space shouldn’t be a privilege reserved for a few countries; it should be infrastructure for humanity. If we succeed, future generations will find it strange that reaching orbit was ever a challenge to begin with.

AVSS: Josh Ogden - Air

AVSS is building sovereign capacity for Canadian-designed and manufactured ground and air robots.

"I dream of a self-reliant Canada that is built with Canadian-made technology, by Canadians. When the world faces disruptions, this nation must be able to stand for itself and not be at the mercy of others. Do or do not, there is no try."

FireSwarm Solutions Inc: Alex Deslauriers - Fire

FireSwarm is developing AI-enabled autonomous ultra-heavy-lift aerial response systems that help humanity move through wildfire and other large-scale crises.

"I dream of a world where disaster is no longer deadly, where autonomy carries life-saving aid to every community on Earth and outpaces the growing size and frequency of disasters before they can become a catastrophe."

What is feasible?

In 1975, NASA and Stanford University conducted a study of how people might permanently sustain life in space on a large scale: Space Settlements: A Design Study

Let it be true that humanity will never cease to dream, that aspiration and ambition are ingrained within our DNA. We as individuals must shape those dreams, if at least as an attempt to play a part in the great progress of our species. Today, we live in an age that yesterday’s people would have considered science fiction. It would be a bad bet to presume that tomorrow will be any different. The delusional are often much more reasonable than we could ever imagine.

“Dreams prepare, announce, or warn about certain situations, often long before they actually happen. This is not necessarily a miracle or a precognition. Most crises or dangerous situations have a long incubation, only the conscious mind is not aware of it. Dreams can betray the secret.” — C.G. Jung, The Symbolic Life (Collected Works, Vol. 18)

Also Pushing The Frontier

"Yet what would history say of me in six hundred years time? For that is a thing which I fear more than the idle chatter of men alive today." — Cicero, 59 BC

The founders above are not alone. These are 36 others pushing the frontier.

The Canadian Explorers

30 Startups for a Sovereign Canada | Canadian30

Canada is recognizing the need for national sovereignty through hundreds of billions of dollars in generational investments, such as the Defence Industrial Strategy, the Canada Strong Fund, and its new National Artificial Intelligence Strategy. According to The Canadian Shield Institute, Canada's defence spending is projected to increase…

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2 months ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Ethan Marcoux

Coming Soon

The Age of Exploration Never Ended: Vol II
It all started with a dream

It is said that fortune favours the bold, but never that being bold is easy. An odyssey is defined as a long, exciting journey, yet Odysseus was named the son of pain. The world shall reward persistence and the faith that every problem can be overcome eventually. It is time for Canadian Dynamism.

If you are building something in Canada, reach out to me here: contact@ethanmarcoux.com

Canada is recognizing the need for national sovereignty through hundreds of billions of dollars in generational investments, such as the Defence Industrial Strategy, the Canada Strong Fund, and its new National Artificial Intelligence Strategy. According to The Canadian Shield Institute, Canada's defence spending is projected to increase 13x over the next 20 years.

While building the Canadian Explorers as the media for Canadian startups operating in the national interest, I have been writing about and speaking directly to the founders building the future of Canadian industry.

These are the 30 Canadian explorers operating in the national interest that I have been following the most closely (not a ranking).

1: Reaction Dynamics

Longueuil, Québec - est. 2017

Founder/CEO: Bachar Elzein

Frontier: Space

Reaction Dynamics is developing hybrid rocket propulsion, which combines solid fuel with a liquid oxidizer to make launch systems simpler, safer, and cheaper. The company was selected for $8.3M through Canada’s Launch the North challenge, raised $14M in Series A funding, and received a $10M grant from the Québec government.

reactiondynamics.space

2: Canadian Strategic Missions Corporation (CSMC)

Toronto, Ontario - est. 2020

Founder/CEO: Daniel Sax

Frontier: Energy

Canadian Strategic Missions Corporation is building mission-critical technology for Canada’s strategic frontiers: Earth, the Arctic, and space. The company is developing portable nuclear microreactor systems designed to support remote energy, Arctic infrastructure, and future off-world operations. CSMC was awarded $400K by the Canadian Space Agency for lunar water extraction and purification technology, received $1.2M through NGen’s Advanced Manufacturing Technology Program, and secured $5M from Alberta for an unfueled prototype microreactor project.

strategicmissions.ca

3: Dominion Dynamics

Ottawa, Ontario - est. 2024

Founder/CEO: Eliot Pence

Frontier: Arctic

Dominion Dynamics is building Arctic defence systems for sensing, autonomy, and communications in Canada’s North. The company has deployed its Auranet platform in the Arctic alongside the Canadian Rangers, raised $26M CAD in venture funding, and announced a $50M investment to build a sovereign autonomous wingman.

dominion-dynamics.com

4: Cohere

Toronto, Ontario - est. 2019

Founder/CEO: Aidan Gomez

Frontier: Cyber

Cohere is building Canadian-built sovereign AI infrastructure for enterprises and public-sector organizations. Its secure enterprise language models, retrieval systems, and agentic AI tools can be deployed in private environments for organizations that need control over sensitive data. Cohere raised $500M USD in 2025 at a $6.8B valuation, then added a $100M USD second close that brought its valuation to approximately $7B.

cohere.com

5: Sentinel R&D

Hamilton, Ontario - est. 2024

Founder/CEO: Kath Intson

Frontier: Air

Sentinel R&D is building Canadian UAV systems for the modern battlefield. The Hamilton-based company develops modular, payload-agnostic fixed-wing drones through its own composite manufacturing IP. Its drone “flies like a bat out of hell,” according to CEO Kath Intson. Sentinel recently launched Airlogix-Sentinel, a partnership with Ukrainian defence technology company Airlogix to manufacture drone systems in Canada for Ukraine’s Armed Forces.

sentinelrd.com

6: North Vector Dynamics

Calgary, Alberta - est. 2022

Founder/CEO: Paul Ziadé

Frontier: Air

North Vector Dynamics is building Canadian air-defence systems to protect against drone and next-generation aerial threats. The company develops counter-UAS systems, precision interceptors, and advanced propulsion technologies, including work with Defence Research and Development Canada on high-speed and hypersonic aeropropulsion. North Vector secured a $4.2M contract with Canada’s Department of National Defence to advance hypersonic propulsion and air-defence capabilities.

northvectordynamics.com

7: Anvil

Ottawa, Ontario - est. 2013

Founder/CEO: Samuel Witherspoon

Frontier: Cyber

Anvil is building Canadian intelligence software for defence, public safety, and national security. The company links intelligence, operations, and planning with AI to help mission teams analyze information faster and make better decisions in complex environments. Anvil has been building in Canadian defence for over a decade, long before the sector was in the spotlight.

anvil.ai

8: NordSpace

Markham, Ontario - est. 2022

Founder/CEO: Rahul Goel

Frontier: Space

NordSpace is building Canada’s sovereign launch capability through rockets, satellites, and spaceport infrastructure. The company is developing launch vehicles, satellite systems, and the Atlantic Spaceport Complex in Newfoundland and Labrador to give Canada its own path to orbit. Through NordSpace Ventures, it also backs Canadian space and dual-use companies. NordSpace was selected for $8.3M through Canada’s Launch the North challenge and has received support from the Canadian Space Agency and NRC IRAP for rocket propulsion and manufacturing.

nordspace.com

9: Prandtl Dynamics

Toronto, Ontario - est. 2023

CEO/Founder: Parth Mahendru

Frontier: Air

Prandtl Dynamics is building Canadian counter-drone technology for urban, civilian, and defence environments. The company develops acoustic detection and low-collateral drone defence systems designed to identify and disrupt drones where kinetic or RF-based systems may be unsafe or restricted. Prandtl was awarded second prize and $375K through Canada’s 2025 Urban Counter-UAS Sandbox, hosted by the Department of National Defence through the IDEaS program.

prandtldynamics.com

10: ONE9

Ottawa, Ontario - est. 2013

Founder/Managing Partner: Glenn Cowan

Frontier: Capital

ONE9 is a Canadian national security venture capital and innovation platform. The firm backs dual-use, defence, security, and critical-infrastructure startups, helping turn Canadian innovation into deployable capability for government, industry, and allied partners. ONE9 has been investing in national security long before defence technology became a mainstream Canadian priority.

one9.ca

11: AVSS

Rothesay, New Brunswick - est. 2017

Founder/CEO: Josh Ogden

Frontier: Air

AVSS is building Canadian aerospace technology for safer drone operations and dual-use logistics. The company develops parachute recovery systems, flight termination systems, and precision-guided delivery tools that help drones operate safely and deliver critical supplies where landing is not possible. AVSS recently launched its Precision Avalanche Management System for drone-based avalanche control and is working with the Government of Canada through Innovative Solutions Canada.

avss.co

12: The Icebreaker

Toronto, Ontario - est. 2025

Founder/CEO: Matthew Lombardi

Frontier: Media

The Icebreaker is Canada’s defence innovation network. Its 0600 SITREP newsletter covers Canadian defence technology, procurement, founders, investors, and national security policy. The Icebreaker partners with CCI to map Canada’s dual-use technology ecosystem and co-chairs the Canadian Defence Investor Network with ONE9.

theicebreaker.ca

13: Tactiql

Ottawa, Ontario - est. 2022

Founder/CEO: Mike Nelson

Frontier: Cyber

TACTIQL is building Canadian defence software for ISR data interoperability and faster battlefield decision-making. The company’s FULCRUM platform conditions, enriches, and distributes mission-critical sensor data in real time so Canadian and allied systems can work together across complex operating environments. TACTIQL has secured nearly $4M in Canadian government R&D contracts, advanced through NATO DIANA, and became the first company selected for Calian Ventures’ defence partnership.

tactiql.com

14: Horizon Aircraft

Lindsay, Ontario - est. 2013

Founder/CEO: Brandon Robinson

Frontier: Air

Horizon Aircraft is building Canadian hybrid-electric vertical takeoff aircraft for regional transport, emergency response, and defence logistics. Its Cavorite X7 is designed to take off like a helicopter, then fly most of its mission like a conventional aircraft, giving it longer range and higher operational utility. Horizon is publicly listed on Nasdaq under HOVR and recently closed $20M USD and $25M USD offerings to fund the Cavorite X7 prototype, testing, certification, and commercial production.

horizonaircraft.com

15: Canada Rocket Company

Toronto, Ontario - est. 2026

Founder/CEO: Hugh Kolias

Frontier: Space

Canada Rocket Company is building a sovereign launch capability so Canada can send payloads to space from Canadian soil, on Canadian timelines. The company is developing domestically controlled light- and medium-lift rocket systems and has attracted Canadian aerospace talent from organizations like SpaceX and the Canadian Space Agency. CRC raised a $6.2M CAD seed round and was selected for $8.3M through Canada’s Launch the North challenge.

canadarocketcompany.com

16: Open Ocean Robotics

Victoria, British Columbia - est. 2018

Founder/CEO: Julie Angus

Frontier: Sea

Open Ocean Robotics is building autonomous ocean-monitoring systems for Canadian maritime security, climate intelligence, and offshore operations. The company develops solar-powered uncrewed surface vessels that collect real-time ocean data and use AI to detect, classify, and track vessels and objects at sea. Open Ocean raised a $2.8M CAD investment round in 2024, received $800K from PacifiCan, and is leading a $3.8M Ocean Supercluster project to advance ocean monitoring in Canada.

openoceanrobotics.com

17: Lastwall

Fredericton, New Brunswick - est. 2014

Founder/CEO: Karl Holmqvist

Frontier: Cyber

Lastwall is building cybersecurity infrastructure to protect governments, defence systems, and critical infrastructure across Western democracies. The company develops identity-first security and quantum-resilient tools that stop unauthorized access before stolen credentials can be used against essential systems. Lastwall raised $16M in 2026, led by BDC Capital’s StrongNorth Fund, to expand its cyber defence platform across Canada.

lastwall.com

18: H2 Analytics

Ottawa, Ontario - est. 2017

Founder/CEO: Hugo Hodgett

Frontier: Cyber

H2 Analytics is building Canadian defence training software for military, intelligence, law enforcement, and public safety teams. Its Exercise Architect Suite helps create realistic, data-rich training exercises so analysts and decision-makers can prepare for modern operational environments. H2 has supported more than 50 exercises with the Canadian Armed Forces, national security agencies, and allied partners.

h2analytics.ca

19: Juno Industries

Vancouver, British Columbia - est. 2025

Founder/CEO: Hunter Scharfe

Frontier: Arctic

Juno Industries is building a Canadian modern defence prime focused on Arctic sovereignty and autonomous systems. The company develops autonomous robotic systems, AI-native command-and-control software, and persistent sensing technology for Arctic and harsh environments. Juno was co-founded by former Minister of National Defence Harjit Sajjan and technology entrepreneur Hunter Scharfe, raised $12M in oversubscribed financing, and is pursuing a public listing through a reverse takeover.

junoindustries.ca

20: FireSwarm Solutions

Squamish, British Columbia - est. 2023

Founder/CEO: Alex Deslauriers

Frontier: Fire

FireSwarm Solutions is building autonomous ultra-heavy-lift drone systems for wildfire suppression, disaster response, and dual-use logistics. Its platform is designed to operate when traditional aircraft cannot, including at night, in smoke, and in conditions unsafe for pilots. FireSwarm received $500K from the B.C. Centre for Innovation and Clean Energy and was selected for NATO DIANA’s 2026 Challenge Programme.

fireswarmsolutions.com

21: AirMatrix

Toronto, Ontario - est. 2018

Founder/CEO: Bashir Khan

Frontier: Air

AirMatrix is building low-altitude airspace intelligence for drones, defence, public safety, and smart cities. The company uses AI, sensor fusion, and drone traffic management software to help governments and operators detect threats, manage airspace, and safely scale drone operations. AirMatrix has received NRC IRAP funding, partnered with Palantir, and deployed its Libra AI platform to support the Government of Canada in securing national airspace.

airmatrix.ai

22: Greypoint Industries

Vancouver, British Columbia - est. 2026

Leadership: Jordan Khoo, Nicholas Chu, and Steven Xu; CEO not publicly disclosed.

Frontier: Air

Greypoint Industries is building Canadian-engineered autonomous systems for infantry and frontline defence. The company develops man-deployable drones and autonomous solutions designed to be cost-effective, scalable, and built for Western defence needs. Greypoint won Canada’s first Defence Tech Hackathon for an Arctic sovereignty concept using satellite data and drones to detect and monitor unidentified vessels.

greypointindustries.ca

23: Wyvern

Edmonton, Alberta - est. 2018

Founder/CEO: Chris Robson

Frontier: Space

Wyvern is building Canadian space intelligence through high-resolution hyperspectral satellite imagery. Its Dragonette satellite constellation can detect details invisible to traditional cameras, supporting applications in defence, maritime monitoring, agriculture, wildfire response, and environmental security. Wyvern raised a $6M USD strategic investment round in 2024, received $2.9M from PrairiesCan for maritime monitoring, and secured a strategic investment from NordSpace Ventures.

wyvern.space

24: Kepler Communications

Toronto, Ontario - est. 2015

Founder/CEO: Mina Mitry

Frontier: Space

Kepler Communications is building a Canadian space communications infrastructure. The company operates satellites that deliver real-time connectivity, optical data relay, on-orbit compute, and hosted payload services for space missions in low Earth orbit and beyond. Kepler raised a $92M USD Series C to build its optical data relay constellation and received $7M from FedDev Ontario to strengthen Canada’s sovereign defence and space capabilities.

kepler.space

25: Skyward Wildfire Technologies

Vancouver, British Columbia - est. 2024

Founder/CEO: Sam Goldman

Frontier: Fire

Skyward Wildfire Technologies is building upstream wildfire prevention to stop lightning-caused fires before they start. The company uses AI weather modelling to identify where lightning is most likely to ignite catastrophic fires, then applies precision atmospheric operations designed to reduce cloud-to-ground strikes in targeted areas. Skyward raised $7.9M CAD in 2026 to scale its platform for governments, asset owners, and critical infrastructure operators.

skywardwildfire.com

26: Quantropi

Ottawa, Ontario - est. 2018

Founder/CEO: James Nguyen

Frontier: Cyber

Quantropi is building a Canadian quantum-secure cybersecurity infrastructure for governments, defence organizations, enterprises, and critical systems. Its QiSpace platform protects data in motion and at rest against today’s cyber threats and future quantum attacks, helping Canada build domestic capability in one of the next major layers of national security. Quantropi is pursuing a public listing through a proposed merger with Mandeville Ventures and plans to raise additional capital alongside the transaction.

quantropi.com

27: ARA Robotics

Montréal, Québec - est. 2014

Founder/CEO: Pascal Chiva-Bernard

Frontier: Air

ARA Robotics is building Canadian drone systems for defence, security, mining, infrastructure, and emergency response. The company manufactures high-end automated drones with Canadian-owned navigation and sensor-data technology, helping protect sensitive operational data from foreign access. ARA and Laflamme Aéro received nearly $8.8M from the Government of Québec to advance locally designed drones, and ARA was selected for Phase 2 of Canada’s Drone Surge challenge.

ara-uas.com

28: Tessellate Robotics

Québec City, Québec - est. 2022

Founder/CEO: Dominic Baril

Frontier: Arctic

Tessellate Robotics is building autonomous navigation systems for Canada’s Arctic, defence, mining, and industrial environments. The company develops rugged GPS-denied navigation and mapping software that allows robots and autonomous vehicles to operate where satellite signals are unavailable, jammed, or unreliable. Tessellate is working with Calian VENTURES to advance autonomous navigation for Arctic defence and was selected for Canada’s NORAD Modernization S&T contest.

tessellate-robotics.com

29: Arcanus Aerial Systems

Toronto, Ontario - est. 2025

Leadership: Sandi Banerjee, President & COO; Matthew Ewing, Executive Vice-President.

Frontier: Air

Arcanus Aerial Systems is building Canadian unmanned aircraft systems for defence, ISR, emergency response, and critical infrastructure monitoring. The company develops long-endurance fixed-wing, VTOL, and hybrid UAV platforms in Canada through an ITAR-free supply chain for Canadian, NATO, and allied operations. Arcanus has announced agreements with Beyond Vision and ENS Dynamics, received formal validation from the Ukrainian military, and secured US$3.15M ahead of its Series A.

arcanus.ca

30: Building Bloc Systems

Burnaby, British Columbia - est. 2024

Founder/CEO: Dr. Harvey Hawes

Frontier: Health

Building Bloc Systems is building deployable microfactories for medical supply resilience in remote, austere, and conflict-affected environments. The company’s systems can produce prosthetics, medical devices, healthcare consumables, and critical replacement parts at the point of need, helping Canada strengthen emergency preparedness, military medical deployments, disaster response, and post-conflict recovery. Building Bloc is working on a Ukraine-focused prosthetics initiative and is seeking Canadian government pathways to fund deployment.

building-bloc.com

What is your favourite Canadian sovereignty startup? Who did I miss? Drop a reply.

If you’re building something in Canada, I want to hear about it. contact@ethanmarcoux.com

CEO and Founder of Anvil, Samuel Witherspoon, has been building a sovereign defence company in Ottawa for over a decade. I asked him a few questions on the floor of CANSEC about his perspective on this opportunity.

In one sentence, what are you building, and why?

“At Anvil, we’re building a sovereign data platform that brings information in a variety of form factors into one place. Makes it exploitable for intelligence operators, military planners, logistics folks, right across the sort of military operation and planning cycle. Why are we building it? We’re building it because, over a decade ago, I experienced some of these very problems while I was working. The conclusion I came to was that there was a massive capability gap in the market, and I thought I could fix it.”

What’s one trait you think a founder needs to succeed in this market?

“One trait founders need is persistence. When I first started, my grandpa bought me a plaque, a quote from Calvin Coolidge. It goes through things like educated men with no job are a proverb, a whole bunch of statements about things you need to be wary of. But it ends with the idea that persistence is omnipotent. And I think the message he was trying to send me, and continues to send me, is that it doesn't matter what your education is; you're not entitled to anything. The only thing you're entitled to is to persist. So founders need persistence. There's no such thing as an overnight success story.”

What is something that new founders are getting wrong?

“We are bootstrapped. We’ve never raised capital. And so one thing I think founders are getting wrong is that they feel like raising money or going out and participating in the venture economy is the only path to getting things done. As opposed to recognizing that, growing out of revenue, growing through sales is actually not just a viable path, but in some ways a less stressful and less adversarial path where you’re the master of your own destiny. You get to choose what you want to work on and how you want to work on it. The benefit is you get a lot more autonomy and retain a whole bunch more control.”

What challenges are Canadian SMEs currently facing? Can bureaucracy be pushed aside?

“Yeah. So I think I’m going to challenge some of the premises of the question. The bureaucracy itself, some of it is unnecessary and overly cumbersome. But some of the bureaucracy is necessary. We work in an industry that is necessarily highly regulated. We work in an industry that is quite literally life or death in some circumstances. We work on very serious problems of national and international consequence. So there is this level of regulation, and there is this level of scrutiny and oversight. We’re working in a highly important, highly regulated industry, and so coming in and complaining that there’s too much bureaucracy. There’s too much oversight. I’m not necessarily sure that they’ve got the balance right, if they’re complaining. Maybe they do.

What are the challenges that are caused by the bureaucracy? I think at times there are too many stakeholders. People who understand and hold the requirement are unequivocally the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces. But then there are a whole bunch of other organizations within the government that believe they are an equal and valuable stakeholder, and sometimes they are. But oftentimes, they use that to leverage their way into speaking on the requirement that DND, CAF holds. And I think that is where the bureaucracy gets in its own way.

The balance between speed and regulation

The requirement holder is ultimately the warfighter. What the warfighter needs, the warfighter should get. There should not be a whole bunch of other people saying, well, actually, I think we should soften this requirement or modify this requirement. That is where the bureaucracy does itself a disservice. Challenging the premise that we shouldn’t have all these regulations, I think in general, some of this regulation is necessary. We’re talking about weapons systems. We’re talking about international traffic in arms. If you want to sell a weapon system in Canada or overseas, you should endure a heightened amount of scrutiny. If you want to handle highly sensitive information, you should endure a higher level of scrutiny and compliance obligations.

All other things being equal, I think a good chunk of regulation is justified and required. When you meet the people who are doing that work, they’re not trying to obstruct because they find it fun. They’re doing it because their job is consequential and getting it wrong is quite literally life or death. There’s a balance to be struck. Where that balance is… I’m sure we can move faster in some areas, but I’m not all about, you know, tearing the system down to the studs and building it back up. I think that there are so many mission-focused, mission-oriented people who are working in the system. I’m optimistic. The system has its flaws, but is, overall, you know, doing the right thing for the most part.”

Do procurement timelines need to be sped up?

“So I think there’s a difference between procurement timelines and the time it takes a requirement to be identified and put out for procurement. I think the difference there is subtle but important. Procurement timelines, if an urgent requirement emerges, there is a very clear pathway to going from that urgent requirement emerging to purchasing. Does it move as fast as anyone would like? Sometimes, sometimes not. You know, we’ve had contracts that have moved very, very quickly. Within days from the requirement to the contract close. We’ve had other contracts that have taken 16 months. That process, I’m reluctant to say, is entirely broken.

What I do see is requirements that are defined a decade or two decades previous, where the procurement process and the requirements definition, the request for information, all of the preliminary steps that go towards ultimately issuing a tender, gathering responses, and buying the thing, those processes are onerous, long, and by the time they hit the street, the actual requirement is so antique that we’re buying yesterday’s technology tomorrow. That process needs to change, where requirements are identified quickly, the procurement is initiated, and the public competition occurs. All of that timeline needs to be compressed. And I think taking a more iterative and incremental approach, as opposed to these giant Franken-procurements where we spend billions of dollars on a system integrator whose job it is then to go and find the different parts and bring them together. That’s an old way of doing things, and I think there’s a lot of room to change how that works.”

After building for over a decade, what is your plan for the next 12 months, given the hype?

“Our plan is probably distinct from a lot of the other companies that are trying to enter the space. We’re already in the space. We’ve already been delivering capability for DND and CAF for a long time at this point, and so we plan to continue to run the way we have run. That’s, focus first and foremost on delivering capability that matters. Letting our actions speak louder than our words and showing up for the warfighters, showing up for the men and women in uniform and making sure that if something needs to get done, it gets done, whether it’s within the construct of the platform we build or whether it’s just making sure everyone has a hot cup of coffee at 8 in the morning. We want to be that valuable, good partner. That’s been how we’ve operated for over a decade, focused on making sure that the people who are doing the work, who are doing the hard stuff. And making sure that their lives are as easy as humanly possible, with the knowledge that we build software at the end of the day. You know, we’re not living in tents, although we do at times. Our job is to minimize the stress, minimize the worry that the operators have.”

What other Canadian national-interest startups are worth watching?

“Two that I’ve worked with for a long time, good friends with both the founders, H2 Analytics, and TACTIQL. So, Hugo Hodgett and Mike Nelson have both been determined founders, working diligently and persistently at breaking into the market, but then they’ve been in the market for several years at this point as well, delivering effect. We share a lot of the same values. We’re focused on how to get effect delivered for the warfighter as fast as possible. And so, really proud to get to work with guys like that, and I think they’re two to watch.”

Why are you building in Canada?

“Well, I’m building in Canada because it’s where I’m from, it’s the country that I love, and so, I wouldn’t want to build anywhere else, first and foremost. But I think for a bunch of us who have either worked alongside DND, CAF or served within it. I think the reality is we feel a deep loyalty to go back and improve the systems and the processes that we came up under, or have worked within. Getting that opportunity to go back in and contribute, even if we’re not in uniform, that’s why we’re building in Canada, and that’s why we want to keep working with Canada and delivering success. Our country matters, and matters a great deal to us that we are faster, more effective and ready for whatever comes next.”

Founders are scrambling to build in the national interest. Investments such as the Defence Industrial Strategy and BDC’s $300m StrongNorth Fund provide new opportunities to scale companies quickly. But that is not the only way. It is essential to learn from what has already been proven to work, and to separate rhetoric from function.

What founders build now will define what Canada can become. The startups operating in the national interest are tilling the soil for Canadian innovation and commercialization as a whole. We must return to our roots as explorers and expand the frontier of what is deemed to be possible.

If you’re building something in Canada, I want to hear about it. contact@ethanmarcoux.com

Theodore Roosevelt’s “Citizenship in a Republic” address at the Sorbonne in Paris, France (1910), also came up during my conversation with Samuel, sharing the spirit of Calvin Coolidge.

Paul Ziadé is the co-founder and CEO of North Vector Dynamics, a Canadian air defence startup building precision, low-cost missiles to protect Canadian and allied skies. He is also the co-chair of the Alliance of Canadian Defence Companies, a new organization representing almost 200 Canadian-controlled defence companies committed to building sovereign capability.
The mission is to industrialize deterrence.

“There’s no shortage of brains […] it’s the vertebral column that tends to be missing.” — David Ogilvy

It is time to start acting and stop waiting for permission.
Fortune Favours the Bold.

Topics discussed

00:41 - Intro: What is North Vector Dynamics?

02:47 - The CM-70 SPEAR: Canada’s low-cost precision air-defence missile

05:48 - What “Industrializing Deterrence” means for Canada

08:17 - Domestic drone threats, ports, shipping containers, and critical infrastructure

10:18 - Who needs air defence beyond the military

12:05 - Why Canadian defence procurement has to change

17:10 - The Alliance of Canadian Defence Companies and Canadian-controlled defence firms

20:50 - Defence as industrial strategy, IP ownership, and Canadian wealth creation

21:41 - Paul’s path from childhood rocketry to engineering, academia, and entrepreneurship

24:05 - Why the corporate and academic paths were not enough

26:13 - Why North Vector Dynamics had to exist

27:19 - Raising capital for defence in Canada and why North Vector stayed here

31:13 - The need for Canadian risk capital and government-industry relationships

35:31 - NORAD modernization, Golden Dome, and Canada’s air-defence opportunity

37:18 - The future of North Vector Dynamics: missiles, hypersonics, sensors, and a Canadian neo-prime

39:44 - Interoperability and fitting into NATO-standard systems

40:19 - Advice for first-time founders: risk, comfort, and doing things without permission

43:43 - How Canada can make sure it follows through

45:30 - How Canada can start dreaming bigger

48:47 - Legacy, fatherhood, and showing younger builders what is possible in Canada

51:02 - Why defence is not a dirty word, and history is not over

Canada faces a choice: step forward into the world, or be left behind.

There is a narrative about Canada that has been repeated so often it has started to feel like fact. That we cannot win. That our ambitions must go south to be taken seriously. That world-changing ideas need to be built somewhere else. History says otherwise.

There is a call for the brave, for the self-believing, and for those willing to swim against stagnancy. There is a chance to prove that Canadians can win.

In our roots, there is resilience. Canada was not built on excess. It was built on persistence.

There Is a Pattern in Our Roots

In the winter of 1921, a young surgeon named Frederick Banting walked into a University of Toronto lab with an idea that most of the medical establishment thought was wrong. He had no research budget, no proper lab space, and no track record in endocrinology. He had ten dogs, a borrowed room, and eight weeks before the facility needed it back. Despite everything, he discovered something that changed the world forever.

One year later, a 14-year-old boy named Leonard Thompson was dying of diabetes in Toronto General Hospital. His blood sugar was sky-high. He had weeks, maybe days. The clinical team administered Banting’s discovery, insulin, for the first time in human history. Within hours, Leonard’s blood glucose fell to normal. He lived for another 13 years, long enough to see the discovery that saved him earn a Nobel Prize.

That story is not an exception in Canada’s history. It is the pattern: a small team, limited resources, enormous ambition, and a result that echoed across generations.

Canada tends to narrate its own story with excessive modesty. We celebrate our politeness and our stability. These are real virtues. But we have grown apologetic, underselling our capacity for bold, world-changing invention. We have lost our own self-belief, and with it, our capability.

The truth is more interesting. Canada has been building at the frontier, in medicine, space, computing, and energy, for centuries. Not as a follower. As a pioneer.

Building at the Frontier

In 1950, while researching hypothermia treatments, electrical engineer John Hopps at the National Research Council made an accidental discovery: a stopped heart could be restarted mechanically or electrically. He built the world’s first cardiac pacemaker. It was large, external, and needed to be plugged into a wall, but the principle was correct. Today, over three million people worldwide carry a direct descendant of Hopps’ invention inside their chests. Canada gave them another heartbeat.

In 1975, NASA invited Canada to contribute to its Space Shuttle program. What Canada brought was a robotic arm, the Canadarm, a 15-metre articulated manipulator that became the most complex construction tool ever deployed. Built by Spar Aerospace (now MDA Space) in Brampton, Ontario, it flew on 90 Shuttle missions between 1981 and 2011. It helped assemble the International Space Station. It serviced the Hubble Space Telescope five times. When astronaut Scott Parazynski needed to repair a torn solar array in 2007 while standing at the end of an extended boom 90 feet above the ISS, it was Canadian technology holding him there.

Canadarm2, launched in 2001, has been a fixture on the ISS ever since. It has captured over 50 visiting spacecraft, including SpaceX’s Dragon and Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus. MDA Space is now deep into building Canadarm3, an AI-powered autonomous robotic system destined for Gateway, NASA’s lunar-orbiting outpost. Canada’s reach is getting longer. We are going to the Moon.

These are not stories of Canadian ingenuity waiting for American permission. They are stories of builders called upon to solve problems no one else could and who delivered.

The Long Revolution in AI

In the 1980s, when virtually every major research institution in the world had abandoned neural networks as a dead end, a British-born researcher named Geoffrey Hinton chose Toronto. He came because Canada was willing to fund speculative, long-horizon research through the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Work that the rest of the world had decided wasn’t worth the risk.

For decades, Hinton in Toronto, Yoshua Bengio in Montreal, and Richard Sutton in Edmonton worked in what felt like academic obscurity. They were studying the mathematics of how the brain might learn. Their colleagues thought they were chasing ghosts. The field was called “deep learning,” and virtually no one believed it would amount to anything practical.

In 2012, Hinton’s lab at the University of Toronto entered the ImageNet competition, the world’s most-watched test of machine vision. They won by a margin so large that it didn’t just beat the competition, it ended the competition. Neural networks weren’t a dead end. They were the beginning. The modern AI revolution, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and every large language model you’ve heard of, runs on architectures descended from work done in Toronto, Edmonton, and Montreal.

In 2018, Hinton, Bengio, and Yann LeCun shared the Turing Award, the Nobel Prize of computer science, for their foundational contributions to deep learning.

Canada did not stumble into AI leadership. It invested in it patiently, for decades, when no one else would. Mila, the Quebec AI Institute co-founded by Bengio at Université de Montréal, is now the largest academic deep learning research centre in the world, with over 1,400 specialized researchers. The Vector Institute in Toronto, co-founded by Hinton, hosts over 1,000 researchers. Together with Amii in Edmonton, these three institutes form a national AI infrastructure that other countries are still trying to replicate.

This is what Canadian patience, ambition, and public investment can produce. Not a fast flip. A foundation that changed the world.

From Research to Runway

Canada’s innovation has not stayed in the lab. Shopify began in Ottawa in 2006 when Tobi Lütke, frustrated by the state of available e-commerce software, built his own. It now powers approximately 5 million stores globally, with a market capitalization of over $200 billion. Lütke, when asked why he hasn’t moved to the United States, replied simply: “Because I like Canada.” In a period when Canada’s sovereignty is under real external pressure, those four words became a rallying cry.

Cohere, founded in Toronto in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst, has become the country’s flagship enterprise AI company. When a large US firm offered to acquire them at a nine-digit price, the founders refused. Today, Cohere is valued at over $7 billion, with revenue growing more than three times over in 2025. CEO Aidan Gomez was direct about why: “I really feel that our country is under threat. I feel that the box of Canada’s sovereignty has been opened, and it can’t be closed.” That is not the language of a startup pitch. That is the language of a builder who understands what is at stake.

Waabi, founded by Raquel Urtasun, who previously led Uber’s self-driving research, is taking a simulation-first approach to autonomous trucking, training its AI in virtual environments rather than running millions of potentially dangerous road miles. Backed by Uber and Khosla Ventures, Waabi began deploying fully driverless trucks in 2025.

Then there is Reaction Dynamics, a Montreal-based rocket propulsion startup building Canada’s capacity to reach orbit independently. A small team, few resources, a hard technical problem, and a mission tied directly to national sovereignty. Canadian Dynamism in practice.

The Unifying Thread

Banting worked on borrowed time in a borrowed lab. Hopps was researching something entirely different when he found the pacemaker. The Canadarm was Canada’s entry ticket to the Space Shuttle program, pragmatic, collaborative, and technically extraordinary. Hinton and Bengio funded deep learning research through Canadian institutions for decades before the world recognized what they had built.

Canadian innovation tends to be long-term. It tends to be patient. It tends to emerge from people willing to work on hard problems, in unglamorous conditions, for timelines that nobody else believes in. It does not tend to be loud. That is both its strength and its weakness.

The strength: Canadian builders build things that last. Insulin. The pacemaker. The Canadarm. Shopify. The foundation of modern AI.

The weakness: We have been better at invention than ownership. We discovered insulin and sold the patent for one dollar each. We conceived the light bulb and sold it to Thomas Edison. We built some of the most important technologies of the 20th century and watched the commercial value accrue abroad. The world benefited, but Canada did not always capture what it created. A sapling that dies before it has the chance to develop its own strength is lost potential. We forced our greatest inventions to move to survive.

Canada needs to start owning, protecting, supporting, and being proud of what makes it great.

The Moment We Are In

The external pressure Canada faces, economic, geopolitical, and technological, is real. But it is also an invitation. An invitation to stop outsourcing our ambition. To stop equating “not losing” with winning. To remember that we have grown world-changing inventions in the fields where no other crops could survive.

The resources were never lavish. Capital has been leaving quietly for two decades. In 2005, Canada’s largest pension fund held 74% of its investments at home. Today it holds 12%. The builders have noticed.

The next generation of builders in AI, in space, energy, defence, biotech, and climate, are not starting from scratch. They are standing on the shoulders of Canadian resilience. On Banting, Hopps, Hinton, and Bengio. They are inheriting a tradition of patient, rigorous, and frontier-facing work that has quietly shaped the modern world.

They need capital that leads, not follows. They need investors willing to sit with hard problems and long timelines. They need an ecosystem that treats ambition as a Canadian value, not an export. Building here is not a consolation prize. It is the point.

There is an opportunity to triumph. We have struggled long enough. Winter is over.

What Canadian Dynamism Means

American Dynamism is explicitly about the national interest, building for America, strengthening America, and making America more competitive. That is a worthy and coherent philosophy.

Canadian Dynamism is something different. It has always been oriented outward. Banting didn’t sell insulin to Canadians. He gave it to the world for a dollar. The Canadarm didn’t build a Canadian space station. It built humanity’s. Hinton and Bengio didn’t create AI for Canada’s benefit. They published their research openly, and the entire world built on top of it.

That is the Canadian instinct: to build things so good and so fundamental that the world cannot do without them. Not to win at the expense of others. To build in a way that makes everyone better off and to be indispensable because of it.

It means backing founders solving hard problems. It means recognizing that resilience of supply chains, infrastructure, sovereignty, and health systems is not a niche thesis. It is the defining challenge of the next decade. It means understanding that the country which built the tools that assembled the International Space Station, gave the world insulin, and quietly invented the foundation of modern AI, is not a country that needs to apologize for its ambitions.

It means building flagships. Not subsidiaries. Not branch offices. Not features inside external platforms. Companies of global scale, owned and led from Canada, solving problems that matter and keeping the value at home.

The Canadian Moat

Dynamism is resilience, a deep patience for difficult problems, combined with a certainty that through hard work, the problem will yield. Patience is the Canadian moat.

Banting didn’t give up when the university laughed at his proposal. Hinton didn’t give up when the field of neural networks was effectively declared dead. MDA didn’t stop building after the Canadarm. They built Canadarm2, then Dextre, and now Canadarm3.

That is the spirit. The one still standing when the problem finally yields.

Canada has always been a nation of builders. We built at the frontier of medicine when it was dangerous and speculative. We built at the frontier of space. We built the intellectual foundations of AI when the rest of the world thought it was a waste of time. We are now building autonomous systems for the Moon, enterprise AI companies with billion-dollar valuations, and rocket propulsion for sovereign access to orbit.

The pattern is clear. The capacity is real. The question is whether the next generation of builders will be supported, with capital, community, and conviction, to build at the scale Canada is capable of.

The future must be claimed. There are flagships to be built.

Ethan Marcoux is a writer and researcher focused on Canadian technology and defence innovation, and the founder of The Canadian Explorers publication.

Amiral Ventures is a Montreal-based seed and pre-Series A venture fund backing Canada’s most ambitious founders in AI-native enterprise software, resilience, and sustainability.

We have been served by the accomplishments of hundreds, if not thousands, of generations of unique human lives. The buildings that we live in, the shoes that we wear, the music we listen to, and the device you are reading this on.
A continuation of the instinct to explore.

Now, we hold the baton. It is our duty to leave the next generation of runners in the strongest position. Not only are we continuing humanity’s legacy, but we are laying the foundation. We look to history, as the future generations of builders will look to us.
For history is not over, we are merely a piece of it.

I asked ten Canadian defence founders to name the builder in history who inspires them most.

These are the Canadian Explorers.

Parth Mahendru - Prandtl Dynamics Inc. | Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827)

Prandtl Dynamics Inc. is building the acoustic intelligence layer of modern security infrastructure.

“Laplace showed that complexity in our world is not randomness, but structure we do not yet understand. The belief that chaos can be harnessed through the right abstractions drives how I build.”

Bachar Elzein - Reaction Dynamics | Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Reaction Dynamics is building a sovereign, tactically distributed and responsive launch architecture for Canada — scaling small launch to medium-lift capability — strengthening national space access and providing resilient, allied deployment capacity across contested domains.

“I admire Beethoven for his grit, sheer work ethic, and relentless drive. As he went deaf, knowing it was coming, he feared losing his greatest gift. Urged to retire, he refused. He chose to go on, because nothing defined him more than his music, and his greatest works came after his hearing was gone. Above all, the Ninth Symphony.”

Ayaan Haider - AirMatrix | James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879)

AirMatrix is building the intelligence layer for airspace, an AI platform that fuses sensor data into real-time awareness and autonomous decision-making.

“He unified electricity and magnetism through Maxwell’s equations, showing that seemingly separate physical phenomena could be understood as one coherent system. That idea of unifying different signals into a structured understanding strongly resonates with how I approach building real-time systems for complex environments.”

Hunter Scharfe - Juno Industries | Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

Juno Industries is a defence technology company with a mission to re-establish Canadian dynamism by building a leading modern defence prime. Juno Industries is focused on developing and deploying advanced autonomous systems, AI-native command and control software, and persistent sensor fabrics to strengthen Canadian and allied national security, sovereignty, and defence capabilities by harnessing Canadian technical talent and innovation.

“At the moment of maximum danger, when every institution around him was counselling retreat, Churchill built resilience. He proved that will and conviction are as decisive as any weapon or resource.”

Josh Ogden - AVSS | K.C. Irving (1899-1992)

AVSS is building sovereign capacity for Canadian-designed and manufactured ground and air robots. No licensing BS. Real R&D investments for products that will keep profits and IP in Canada.

“He started his entrepreneurial journey in his 20s with an opportunity to grow a Ford dealership and expanded into a vertically integrated global business that employs and contributes to the Canadian economy.”

Paul Ziadé - North Vector Dynamics | J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967)

North Vector Dynamics is building precision, low-cost missiles to protect Canadian and allied skies.

“Oppenheimer left the ivory tower to build something massive that altered the course of human history - and not obviously for the better. A man of broad intellectual range, drawn to science, philosophy and religion, he ultimately had to reckon with what he'd made. I find complicated people like that fascinating and worth studying.”

Brandon Robinson - Horizon Aircraft | Kelly Johnson (1910-1990)

Horizon Aircraft is building a hybrid-electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) aircraft that will improve the lives of countless Canadians.

“One of my favourite builders in recent history is Kelly Johnson, widely regarded as one of the most talented and prolific aircraft design engineers in the history of aviation. He built several famous aircraft, including the legendary U2 spy aircraft and the SR-71 Blackbird, perhaps one of the most impressive aircraft ever made.”

Mike Nelson - TACTIQL | Margaret Hamilton (1936-)

TACTIQL is a Canadian, veteran-owned software engineering company that builds software that enables sensors, command-and-control systems, and AI to operate seamlessly together in mission-critical defence environments.

“Margaret Hamilton inspires me because she helped pioneer software engineering while leading the team that developed the flight software for NASA’s Apollo missions. Her work proved that carefully designed software could operate reliably in mission-critical environments and played a vital role in the success of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing.”

Samuel Scrivens - Pelagos | Chris Hadfield (1959-)

At Pelagos, we’re building autonomous underwater systems in Canada, beginning with Vantage, a backpack-portable littoral AUV designed for agile, autonomy-forward subsea operations.

“Chris Hadfield inspires me because he made exploration feel tangible, disciplined, and real. As a kid who wanted to be an astronaut, he showed me that ambitious builders could come out of Canada and push the frontier forward.”

Daniel Sax - CSMC | Bruce Flatt (1965-)

CSMC is building nuclear reactors deployable to the most remote areas, on this earth and off it.

“Bruce Flatt, Brookfield - built a global champion business from Canada, with a mixture of discipline and hard work, seeing value where others didn't.”

If you're building something in Canada, I want to hear about it. contact@ethanmarcoux.com

A montage of the Canadian Explorers:

Canada is resource-rich, yet fails to produce.
This is not just policy. It is in our veins.

If Canadians are not rewarded, they will leave.
A country that loses its explorers will be paralyzed.
Explorers need a spotlight, and creation must be desirable.
The critic, the one who plays it safe, cannot be sought after.

Now is the moment when preparation becomes an excuse for cowardice, and when action is the only reasonable step left.
It is time to decide that this can be a nation of winners, and that ‘not losing’ does not suffice as an equivalent.

North Vector Dynamics is building air defence, NordSpace & Reaction Dynamics are taking Canada to space, and Dominion Dynamics is pushing the Arctic forward.

Canada can be an Arctic powerhouse, a spacefaring nation, or a leader in oceanic exploration.
But ‘can’ is temporary.
The Canadian Explorers is highlighting founders who are pushing the frontier for all Canadians.

It is time to stop watching, critiquing, and waiting for someone else to do it for you. We have enough experts.
We need explorers.

If any founders are interested in a chance to speak publicly in a video interview about what and why they are building, get in touch.

Ethan

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