After a quiet few years, it looks like our friendly neighbors up north are diving headfirst into defense tech.
Hot off a $15.2M ($21M CAD) seed round in January, Canadian defense tech startup Dominion Dynamics kicked things up a notch late last week, announcing plans to invest $37M ($50M CAD) to kickstart development of Scout, their Collaborative Combat Aircraft purpose-built for the Arctic.
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: everyone loves a tiny plane.
Arctic Anduril: Dominion Dynamics is taking a page out of the Anduril playbook: they want to build Canada’s first neo-prime, CCA and all. Fitting, given that Dominion founder and CEO Eliot Pence previously led Anduril’s international business.
The company (which emerged from stealth with $2.9M ($4M CAD) in pre-seed funding last October) has rolled out a few products through some speedy internal R&D:
- Sentry towers: Dominion’s first operational offering is its network of sentry towers, focused on surveillance of super-remote Arctic airstrips, and deployed since last September.
- Auranet: Dominion’s take on Anduril’s Lattice, Auranet is a “distributed, attritable mesh network designed for no comms environments,” Pence told Tectonic earlier this year.
- IceSpike: Put simply, a screw that is dropped from a helicopter and autonomously drills through the Arctic ice, drops a hydrophone under the water, and feeds sensor data through Auranet. They demoed IceSpike for the Royal Canadian Navy last month.
Loyal wingman: Dominion’s future drone wingman, called Scout, is the startup’s “big swing” on the CapEx front. It’s designed for Canada’s Autonomous Collaborative Platform (ACP) program, their version of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, but it’s going to look a little different than the CCA prototypes under development south of the border.
Given Canada’s unique (i.e., cold and remote) operating environment, it’ll likely end up being “roughly a similar size, wing tip to wing tip [to US CCAs], able to fly two or three times the distance” and capable of teaming with “smaller and more tactical platforms” in a family of autonomous systems, Pence said.
First things first: Dominion has a ways to go before Scout takes flight, but they’re not getting ahead of themselves:
- The initial $50M investment—drawn from a combination of internal R&D (IRAD) spending, venture funding, and government backing—is put towards developing a “simulated environment” for Scout, where Pence said Dominion will “test out different types of platforms for different kinds of threats.”
- That “simulation engine,” Pence added, will “spit out different platforms we would then design and build a prototype for.” It’s expected to be finished in the next three months, and once they settle on the design, Dominion will spend up to a year on “supply chain vetting,” and “at the soonest, we can have a prototype in 24 to 36 months.”
- Dominion will build the prototype in their 25,000-square-foot factory in Ottawa, but they’re in active talks with aircraft OEMs—two Canadian and two European—to bring Scout into production. “After low-rate initial production, that’s not our bailiwick, that’s somebody else’s.”
- Pence said that Dominion is planning to raise more capital later this year to fund the initial development and production of the Scout prototype.
“Once we have a prototype, we can move into production quickly,” Pence said. “Our goal is to serve the Canadian need, but also be one of the first to market in NATO.”
All about sovereignty: For those keeping their eyes closer to home, Canada has gone all-in on building up a sovereign defense ecosystem. Late last year, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a budget calling for a $58B ($82B CAD) increase in defense spending over five years, including almost $5B ($6.6B CAD) towards growing startups within Canada’s domestic defense industrial base.
Dominion is gearing up to capitalize on that Carney Cash with Scout and its range of other platforms.
“We’ve taken all of the oxygen out of the room [in Canadian defense tech],” Pence told Tectonic earlier this year. “I think we’re extremely well-positioned to be the company that the government takes a serious bet on.”