Ottawa-based defence company Calian is watering the seeds of Canada’s burgeoning defence industry with a $100 million CAD platform led by its new Ventures arm.
Calian said the funding will be drawn from multiple sources, including capital investment from its Ventures arm, co-development with Canadian small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs), and contributions from regional investment agencies and federal programs.
The program aims to support domestic innovation in C5ISRT, which stands for Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance and Targeting. C5ISRT is an operational standard that Calian says results in faster decision-making and tighter integration across combat mediums like land, sea, air, space, and cyber.
“We can’t build sovereign Canadian capability singularly on tax dollars.”
Chris Pogue
Calian
C5ISRT “are the ‘what’s,’ Ventures is ‘how’ to enable those [to be built] in Canada, and the ‘why’ we’re doing all this is really all about Canadian sovereign capability,” Calian president of defence and space, Chris Pogue, told BetaKit in an interview on Monday.
“Canada needs that sovereign capability, and so we selected what we believe is essential to Canadian sovereignty as the place to focus on,” Pogue said.
Calian launched Calian Ventures in October 2025 to help businesses with existing solutions test, validate, and sell their defence offerings to the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF). The program aims to help SMBs navigate the procurement process and foster collaboration between different players in Canada’s defence tech ecosystem.
The Ventures program isn’t trying to be a typical accelerator or incubator program, Pogue said. Instead, Calian poses as a partner for these startups to access capital, connect with customers (like the CAF), or even manufacturing capacity in its facilities.
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Pogue said 50 companies have applied to Ventures since its launch, and that it’s spurred conversations with large funds and family offices trying to understand how to enter the defence space. The $100 million initiative aims to establish a network of development labs across the country to accelerate the testing, validation, and scaling of the defence technologies developed through Ventures.
“We can’t build sovereign Canadian capability singularly on tax dollars,” Pogue said. “We need new capital to get injected, and I think we’re trying to cause that momentum.”
There has been increased venture and government spending in defence tech as Canada focuses more on its sovereign and military capabilities. The City of Ottawa, where Calian is based, made its own push to become the “heartbeat” of Canada’s defence innovation economy this past fall, releasing an economic strategy intended to attract up to $3 billion in its local defence innovation sector over the next five years.
Feature image courtesy Calian.