Kepler Communications co-founder and CEO Mina Mitry was trying to launch Canada into space before it was cool.
When he started the satellite communications company a decade ago, Mitry said people thought there was no way someone could build a Canadian company focused on space. Now? It’s all the rage.
Next month, Mitry will take the stage at the second annual Homecoming, the official mainstage event of Toronto Tech Week 2026. Held this year at a new venue, History, Homecoming is just one of over 300 partner-run events taking place during Toronto Tech Week from May 25-29.
“There are probably very few true impacts I could make with my lifetime, and this is one of them.”
Mina Mitry, Kepler
In January, Kepler became the first company in the world to launch a low-earth orbit satellite system based on an optical relay network. While everyone attending the launch, including Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, celebrated when the rocket went up, Mitry said it took his team weeks of connecting satellites via lasers before they could properly enjoy the moment.
As a media partner of Toronto Tech Week, BetaKit sat down with Mitry ahead of Homecoming to learn more about the historic satellite network launch, Canada’s potential to be a major player in the space domain, and the best barbecue joint in Toronto.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You’re speaking at Toronto Tech Week’s Homecoming event. Can you give us a sneak preview of what you plan to talk about?
Democratized access to space and the future of space and AI, because I think that there’s a big intersection there.
We talk a lot about the need for inference and autonomy in space, especially if you’re doing things like detecting and tracking objects through space. You can’t really do that without good AI tools.
What’s it like to run a space company in Canada?
It’s really, really hard.
Canada is a risk-averse culture to begin with, so when you take on an ambitious program like building a company that’s going to bring things to space, you’re constantly having to overcome skepticism.
When we started the business in 2016, I think people thought it was just completely crazy for us to do anything that resembled launching something into orbit.
Some of that has changed. On the positive side, ambition brings the right talent around you. When you put up this broad ambition of ‘how do we bring the internet and all the benefits of it outside of Earth,’ which includes cloud computing and all sorts of access to applications, you get surrounded by people who are willing to be like-minded. They make the really, really hard part much easier.
Why do you think this work is important?
During my undergrad and my master’s, I built up a not-for-profit called the University of Toronto Aerospace Team, which is a group of volunteers.
I think it dawned on me then that we’re just in a completely different era for space. Gone are the days when space was controlled by trillionaires. You don’t have the Soviets and the US owning space. We, as a volunteer-based organization, could go out and reach, touch, and access space. This grew this fascination over the idea of, if space transportation is a solved problem, what’s the remaining infrastructure to build a truly robust space economy? That’s where the idea of Kepler came about.
I think about this often: why am I doing this? I reflect, and there are probably very few true impacts I could make with my lifetime, and this is one of them. I just get so excited about the concept of being able to meet the mission of this business and what that actually means for humanity at large.
The federal government recently introduced legislation that’s intended to create a framework for Canada to launch into space. Why is it important for Canada to have sovereign launch capacity?
I think it’s pretty long overdue; we should have had sovereign launch a while ago. Launch capacity is a huge constraint right now, globally.
We have such an enormous land mass compared to any other country in the world. You want to be able to monitor that land mass. When you have such an enormous land mass, the only credible way to have a vantage point of it is through space, right?
We need to have that vantage point from space to be able to monitor for wildfires, monitor for defence protection, and be able to give weather updates to citizens.
If you want to get up into orbit right now, it’s pretty hard to do before 2030, maybe later. That’s a long time to wait when you know you need to monitor millions of square kilometres in the far North.
Can Canada become a major space player?
Canada, historically, was a major space player. We shouldn’t forget that we have a proud heritage, starting from the Alouette 1, which was the first satellite that launched out of Canada (Editor’s note: it was also the first satellite launched outside of the US and USSR), to Artemis II astronaut Jeremy Hansen as the first non-American to go in and around the moon.
But we’ve been on the decline since 2017. If you look at industry revenues in 2017, we had $5.5 billion. In 2024, it was down to $5 billion. In that period of decline, the world around us was actually growing, right? Everybody was investing more in space.
I don’t want to build such a dire narrative that we can’t get out of it, but we used to be a powerhouse in space. I think the right reforms, like trying to build an ecosystem through step-function growth and procurement, is the right way to return to a growing industry.
What does Kepler bring to the Canadian space race?
We deliver a full-stack, real-time infrastructure to build space applications. So, you have any application in mind that leverages space—wildfire detection and missile detection are the two bookends that I talk about—you can come to Kepler, and we will give you infrastructure to do that.
Our satellite communications network allows you to route data from space to Earth in real time. Normally, it takes 30 minutes to three hours to get data back. That’s the core differentiator: real-time.
When we started the business in 2016, I think people thought it was just completely crazy for us to do anything that resembled launching something into orbit.
We use laser links for communication. Think of being able to point a laser at an object the size of a baseball 6,500 kilometres away, and hold it steady while you’re moving at 7.5 kilometres per second.
Then we do payload or sensor hosting. You can put any piece of equipment on one of the satellites we build here in Toronto, so that when we send it up into orbit, you don’t worry about any of the plumbing, so to speak.
The last thing we’re developing right now is intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance on the same infrastructure. So we combine our value proposition of real-time access to data with the natural sensors that we’ve been putting up.
Kepler launched the world’s first optical relay satellite network, beating out players like Amazon and SpaceX, back in January. Take me through that moment in the control room.
I don’t know if I’m the best person for this; my team has a series of emojis for me. They’re happy Mina, sad Mina, frustrated Mina, and angry Mina, and they’re all the same. [Editor’s note: True to his emoji, Mitry was stone-faced during these remarks, too.]
It was a mile marker event that represented not just a great advance for Kepler, but I think a great advance for the Canadian economy at large. That’s one of the most significant space events out of Canada this year. I’m okay to be second to Jeremy Hansen going to the moon, but there’s nothing else.
Seeing the launch go up, look, the rocket is very reliable. So we didn’t worry too much about the rocket going up and making it into orbit, really, all the things we worry about are what happens after.
In more earthly matters, what’s one restaurant in Toronto I should try during Toronto Tech Week?
I really like Carbon Bar. It’s a barbecue place. They have a big platter, so it’s not one item; I think it’s the entirety of their barbecue feast. You can’t go wrong with that. It’ll be fried chicken, brisket, ribs, and some sausage. I don’t want to get you too excited, but you have to bring a friend because it’s not for one person.
Noted. Opportunity to eat good BBQ aside, why are events like Homecoming important for the Canadian tech ecosystem?
I think it’s a really, really great moment to have entrepreneurs in a common space, to just talk to each other. We don’t have a lot of that as a natural ecosystem, right? If you’re out in the Bay Area, it’s very different; there’s just so much more opportunity for you to meet with peers. Just pick your Peet’s Coffee Shop, and you’ll find yourself with random people who are working on something large, ambitious, and can help be a peer reference or source of intelligence for you.
Tech Week is a great place to help encourage some of those dialogues and some of the same conversations that don’t really quite happen naturally within our ecosystem.
BetaKit is a Toronto Tech Week media partner.
Feature image courtesy Kepler Communications.