I have returned and recovered from a busy week in Ottawa, covering both Budget 2025 and SAAS NORTH.
There’s an interesting overlap between those two events. With Budget 2025, the federal government has kickstarted a national defence tech sector. While we still don’t know the strategy, we know how much the feds are willing to spend, with almost $7 billion going to the defence industrial strategy as part of a broader $82 billion defence commitment.
“ This is a generational opportunity for entrepreneurs. You have a chance to change a country.”
Two days after the budget dropped, on the BetaKit Keynote Stage at SAAS NORTH, I got to speak with Dominion Dynamics founder and CEO Eliot Pence. Right now, Dominion Dynamics is building a sensor network platform to aid Arctic surveillance, but Pence’s ultimate goal is to build Canada’s first “defence prime.”
“Too many American subs dominate this market,” he told me. “ Eighty percent of what we buy is from American companies. We wanna reverse that. We wanna make 80 percent of what we buy from Canadian companies. So we frankly don’t care what we do as long as we are a Canadian defence company.“
Pence believes that Canadian entrepreneurs face a generational opportunity to change the direction of this country, with defence as an economic multiplier and repatriation tool. There’s also the whole continued sovereignty thing, which seems important.
On this episode of The BetaKit Podcast, recorded live at SAAS NORTH, Pence details that opportunity, his thoughts on the various budget commitments, and why ‘buy Canadian’ isn’t a nice-to-have.
Will Canadian entrepreneurs answer the call? Let’s dig in.
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Feature image courtesy SAAS NORTH.