When Dominion Dynamics raised the largest Series-A funding round in Canadian history for a defence technology company earlier this year, founder Eliot Pence summed up his aggressive business philosophy in one sentence.
“We will live or die by our ability to either change the rules of the game or play a different game,” Pence told OBJ in June, before his one-year-old Kanata-based startup announced it had received a $139-million investment led by Toronto’s Georgian Capital.
Those would be bold words coming from many Ottawa entrepreneurs, but Pence is cut from a different cloth.
From the day he launched Dominion Dynamics on June 6, 2025 — a date chosen to coincide with the 81st anniversary of D-Day — Pence has shown he’s comfortable in the role of disruptor. Pence’s willingness and ability to shake up the Canadian defence establishment has earned him Newsmaker of the Year honours from OBJ and the Ottawa Board of Trade.
The Victoria, B.C., native returned to Canada last year after two decades in Washington D.C., intent on creating what he called a new kind of Canadian defence contractor.
Pence, who holds a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Victoria and a master’s degree from Yale, spearheaded U.S. defence firm Anduril Industries’ international expansion from 2018 to 2022.
Founded in 2017, Anduril quickly became a leader of a new wave of “neoprime” defence firms known for rapidly developing and implementing a range of technologies. In an interview with OBJ last October, Pence left no doubt about why he came back home: to create Canada’s own version of Anduril.
“It kind of became clear to me the gap in the Canadian market was an ambitious, aggressive integrator of Canadian technologies,” Pence said. “That’s really the gap that we’re filling here.”
Rather than taking the traditional approach of waiting for the defence establishment to come to it with requests for proposals, Dominion is proactively identifying problems and solving them in the hope that customers will buy in.
“We just want to show things and have the government say, ‘Yeah, we like this or we don’t like this,’” Pence explained last fall. “And we’re willing to take that risk. If we wait for an RFP, we’ll die. We’re venture-backed. We have to land and expand rapidly.”
With the federal government ramping up military spending in the face of growing concern over Canadian sovereignty, Pence’s pitch found a receptive audience.
In addition to attracting big-name investors such as Georgian, OMERS, RBC and the British Columbia Investment Management Corp., Dominion has gained a bevy of heavyweight advisers, including former federal Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole and former chief of defence staff Wayne Eyre.
The firm’s flagship product is 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.
Meanwhile, the company is working on other projects, including 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.
Full expansion mode
The military establishment is taking notice.
The Canadian Rangers — a part of the military stationed in isolated and coastal regions — used the technology earlier this year in the High Arctic, perhaps the country’s harshest environment. After a request from the Canadian Armed Forces in July, Dominion built and delivered a brand-new product to integrate its sensors into an existing CAF software system in just four days — an almost unheard-of timeframe in military procurement circles.
Looking to seize what it hopes will be a generational opportunity as demand for military technology skyrockets, Dominion is in full expansion mode.
The firm recently opened a new 30,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Kanata, and Pence said he’s already looking at building another facility that would be 10 times as large, possibly in Ottawa, Toronto or Montreal. Pence expects the company, which employed fewer than a dozen people 12 months ago, to have a payroll of 200 by the time the year is out.
“I want to go as fast as we possibly can, and I want to think big — frankly, as big as we possibly can,” he told OBJ in June.
Dominion’s founder has wasted no time making an impact on the Canadian defence ecosystem in other ways as well.
Pence co-chairs the Alliance of Canadian Defence Companies, a new industry organization that is lobbying the government on its members’ behalf and aims to “foster deeper co-ordination across the defence supply chain.” Launched nine months ago, the group already has more than 200 members.
Pence is also a driving force behind Deploy, a one-day summit for entrepreneurs and investors that will take place next month during the annual SaaS North conference in Ottawa.
“Canada’s next generation of defence technology will be built by ambitious entrepreneurs,” Pence said in a news release announcing the summit, adding the event aims to help domestic defence-tech enterprises “scale globally while strengthening Canada’s sovereign industrial capabilities.”
The Newsmaker of the Year award is part of the Best Ottawa Business Awards — better known as the BOBs — which are presented annually each fall.
Pence and other notable local business leaders — including the CEO of the Year and the CFO of the Year — will receive their awards at a gala at The Westin Ottawa on Thursday, Nov. 26. More information on the gala can be found here.
