In Chapter Two of Canadian Explorers, I sit down with Samuel Witherspoon to discuss persistence, national security, and the decade-long path to building ANVIL.
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
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
