Everywhere you look in NATO, defense tech startups are popping off, but our friendly neighbors up north have (for the most part) stayed out of the spotlight. Dominion Dynamics wants to change that.
On Monday, the Canadian startup announced it has raised $15.2M ($21M CAD) in seed funding to develop a persistent multi-domain surveillance and sensing network purpose-built for the Arctic, bringing its total funding to $18.8M ($26M CAD). The seed round, in keeping with Dominion’s sovereign defense ethos, was led by Canadian VC Georgian, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners and the British Columbia Investment Management Corporation (BCI).
Might want to keep an eye up north, eh?
Starting from scratch: Funding for sovereign defense is getting a big boost around the world, and Canada is no exception.
Way back in December, Canadian PM Mark Carney rolled out a new defense budget calling for a $58B ($82B CAD) spending increase over five years. In that pot of maple-scented cash, the government is setting aside a big ol’ $4.7B ($1B CAD) to create a new investment program to bolster the domestic defense industry.
The problem is that Canada, unlike its NATO allies, doesn’t really have a real defense prime or integrator. Another problem is that Canada’s defense problem set—especially its harsh Arctic environment—is pretty unique. Dominion is stepping in to solve that.
“Canada has basically just borrowed America’s [defense industry], and now it can’t do it anymore,” Dominion’s founder and CEO (and Anduril’s former international business boss) Eliot Pence told Tectonic. “Dominion has the opportunity to be the platform that allows the government to say, ‘Look, we want to build this, and we want it to be Canadian. Who can do the integration and play across domains?’”
Arctic Anduril: Dominion Dynamics is taking a page out of Pence’s former employer’s playbook—they want to build Canada’s first neo-prime.
The company (which emerged from stealth with $2.9M ($4M CAD) in pre-seed funding last October) has rolled out a few products through fast-paced internal R&D:
- Sentry towers: Dominion’s first offering is its network of sentry towers focused on Arctic airstrips. The towers have been deployed since last September, offering persistent surveillance for aircraft in super-remote areas.
- Auranet: Dominion’s take on Anduril’s Lattice, Auranet is a “distributed, attritable mesh network designed for no comms environments,” Pence said. It’s built on top of existing mesh radios and aggregates data from different sensors—including Dominion’s—to create predictive frameworks and data ontologies (à la Palantir).
- IceSpike: Put simply, a screw that is dropped from a helicopter, autonomously drills through the Arctic ice, drops a hydrophone in the sub-ice water, and “pulls that data and information up through the ice into Auranet,” according to Pence. Dominion is demoing IceSpike for the Royal Canadian Navy in February.
- Scout: A drone for Canada’s Autonomous Collaborative Platform (ACP) program—their version of the collaborative combat aircraft—designed for work alongside fifth-gen fighters. Pence called Scout Dominion’s “big swing” on the capex front, and said they have a 25,000 square-foot factory in Ottawa to build it.
With this new cash in hand, Dominion is focused on “more software and more deployments,” Pence said. “Deployments in the Arctic are super-expensive.”
On top of funding their R&D programs, Dominion is also looking to nearly triple their team size to over 50 this quarter and build out its testing infrastructure in the Yukon and its manufacturing facility in Ottawa.
Tissue tech: In the end, Dominion’s real play is developing the layer between all of Canada’s Arctic security assets. “The future is going to be multi-domain and all about connected mass,” Pence said. “To me, the most important thing we’re trying to solve—rather than surveillance—is how to connect disparate assets in a way that’s intelligent and dynamic, and in truly the most inhospitable environment.”
With this financing, Dominion is confident that it’s pretty primed to capitalize on the opportunity to build the country’s defense multi-domain neo-prime well beyond this seed round.
“We’ve taken all of the oxygen out of the room [in Canadian defense tech]…and I think we’re extremely well-positioned to be the company that the government takes a serious bet on,” Pence told Tectonic. “We just need to continue to engage and build the trust of the user to maintain the respect and interest we’ve developed, and I have no doubt that we’ll be able to do that.”