With military spending ramping up, Ottawa’s most buzzworthy defence-tech firm is launching an event this fall aimed at bringing entrepreneurs and investors together to grow the next generation of defence companies. The organizers of SaaS North AI announced last week that Kanata-based Dominion Dynamics will host a one-day summit this fall for businesses “eyeing, entering, […]
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With military spending ramping up, Ottawa’s most buzzworthy defence-tech firm is launching an event this fall aimed at bringing entrepreneurs and investors together to grow the next generation of defence companies.
The organizers of SaaS North AI announced last week that Kanata-based Dominion Dynamics will host a one-day summit this fall for businesses “eyeing, entering, or expanding in the defence and dual-use market.”
The event, dubbed Deploy, will take place on Nov. 5, the second day of the annual SaaS North conference at Rogers Centre Ottawa. In a news release last week, the event’s organizers said they want to “normalize the idea that building for defence is a legitimate, even patriotic, path for a Canadian software founder.”
“Canada’s defence build-out is real, and a lot of our best founders are quietly asking whether they belong in it,” SaaS North AI co-founder David Tyldesley said in the release. “They haven’t had a straight answer, or a room of their own to find one.”
Co-sponsored by Ottawa defence-tech firm Anvil Intelligence, the summit comes amid a surge in military spending as the federal government looks to boost its investment in defence from two per cent of the country’s GDP to five per cent by 2035.
Canadian-owned firms stand to get a big boost. The federal Defence Industrial Strategy, announced in February, commits $6.6 billion over five years to bolster the domestic defence industry, with the goal of increasing the share of federal defence contracts awarded to Canadian-headquartered firms from 43 per cent today to 70 per cent by 2035.
The organizations behind Deploy argue that the products and services the federal government hopes to buy from homegrown companies might already exist, “if those founders can be convinced the market is theirs to build and to keep at home.”
Organizers say the one-day summit, which will be included in the SaaS North admission pass, is targeted at established defence-tech founders as well as entrepreneurs who are “still deciding whether defence is for them.”
The agenda will focus on what organizers describe as “product-problem fit.”
According to officials from SaaS North and Dominion Dynamics, while most successful software products win customers because they are “faster, cheaper or more capable,” the defence industry “buys specific capabilities that solve problems it already recognizes, which means a technically excellent product can be irrelevant.”
Deploy aims to help founders figure out whether their products actually meet the defence industry’s needs. In addition, organizers say the summit will address topics such as the criteria investors use to determine whether a startup is worth funding and “how the market actually buys” defence technology.
"Canada's next generation of defence technology will be built by ambitious entrepreneurs,” Dominion Dynamics founder and CEO Eliot Pence said in last week’s news release, adding the new summit “exists to help them scale globally while strengthening Canada's sovereign industrial capabilities.”
Joining forces with SaaS North is the latest headline-grabbing initiative from Pence’s one-year-old enterprise.
Earlier this summer, Dominion Dynamics closed a $139-million funding round led by Toronto-based venture capital firm Georgian Capital. Dominion said it was the largest Series-A funding round in history for a Canadian defence technology company.
The Kanata firm is best known for AuraNet, a network of sensors and a map-based platform that can collect, trace and transmit information from remote regions with no or patchy cell service.
The Series A will bolster AuraNet and help develop Scout, an uncrewed, AI-powered drone Dominion Dynamics is building to operate independently or alongside fighter jets. It will be deployable to environments too dangerous or remote to risk sending pilots into.
Dominion expects its new 30,000-square-foot factory on Schneider Road to be fully operational by the end of the summer. Pence told OBJ the firm’s employee count could reach 200 by the end of this year as production at the new facility accelerates.
SaaS North, which bills itself as “Canada’s longest-running and largest gathering of software-as-a-service, AI-native, and cloud software scaleup companies,” will take place Nov. 4 and 5 at Rogers Centre Ottawa.
Organizers say they expect more than 2,000 attendees at the 11th edition of the two-day event, which was co-founded in 2016 by Kanata’s L-Spark accelerator and Vancouver-based Cube Business Media.
