Speaking at BetaKit’s Most Ambitious: Town Hall on Monday, Dominion Dynamics founder and CEO Eliot Pence said that in an era of modern warfare, Canada can no longer afford sluggish defence procurement.
“We’re in a moment in time in which we want to privilege Canadian companies, and we have not done that for a long time,” Pence told the audience during a defence tech panel moderated by BetaKit reporter Madison McLauchlan. “We took a long time to buy things, and we, generally speaking, privileged … not Canadian companies.”
“We’re in a moment in time in which we want to privilege Canadian companies, and we have not done that for a long time.”
Eliot Pence,
Dominion Dynamics
Pence was joined by fellow defence tech entrepreneur Kath Intson, of Sentinel R&D, which recently entered into a partnership with Ukraine’s Airlogix to provide drone manufacturing support for the war in Ukraine, and Christian Weedbook, of quantum computing company Xanadu. The panel’s conversation covered arctic sovereignty, attracting domestic venture capital, NATO’s weaponry gaps, as well as Xanadu’s involvement in both the US DARPA program and Canada’s quantum champion program.
Pence, who founded Dominion Dynamics in 2025, said that in an era of geopolitical instability and increasingly asymmetric warfare, Canada’s Department of National Defence’s procurement process needs to be more nimble and domestically-focused if Canada is to remain competitive, and ultimately, sovereign.
“We’re now at an inflection point where we can’t consider what to buy for a decade, we have to buy it now,” Pence said, adding that procurement cycles should be done in weeks, days, and hours, rather than years.
“We shouldn’t be considering these things for more than a year. We have to do in-year procurement,” he said. “It took us 16 years to buy F-35 [fighter jets] … it took us 20 years to consider what drones to buy. That’s just an irrelevant time frame for modern warfare.”
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Pence said he sees his company as playing a key role in advancing that procurement reform by acting as a “systems integrator” in the defence space. Systems integrators are companies that connect multiple vendors or resources across a value chain to create a single, cohesive system. For Pence, that means Dominion Dynamics is agnostic about the technology it’s developing, as long as it results in a domestically produced end product.
“Honestly, I don’t really care what it is that I build. I care that I build the end product—the subs we’re buying, the fifth-generation fighters we’re buying, all of the other things that we are buying,” he said. “I want us to build them in Canada, with Canadians, with Canadian tech that we control and that we own now.
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Feature image courtesy Lilac for BetaKit.