Ottawa-based defence tech firm Dominion Dynamics is partnering with the Arctic Training Centre (ATC) in Whitehorse to develop and test its systems designed to help defend the Canadian North.
“We are ultimately planning on building a sovereign defence prime [contractor] for Canada [that] can compete with the American primes and European primes.”
Mitch Carkner, Dominion Dynamics
The three-year partnership agreement provides Dominion Dynamics with access to the ATC’s testing facilities in the Yukon, where it will use the “unique northern environment” to test and validate its sensing, autonomy, and communications technologies purpose-built for extreme operations.
The partnership is “absolutely critical,” Dominion COO Mitch Carkner told BetaKit in an interview. Otherwise, the company would be limited to testing its tech through military invitations to the Arctic or negotiating with local communities for limited property use.
Instead, the ATC gives Dominion a permanent installation in a near-Arctic environment where it can test its tech and demonstrate to potential customers in the Canadian Forces.
“Today, we’re building our hardware and software in Ottawa and Toronto, but that’s in a lab environment,” Carkner said. “We need a place where we can actually go deal with minus 35 [temperature].”
Dominion was founded in June and claims to have already raised a “very substantial” pre-seed round, backed exclusively by Canadian private capital, including Golden Ventures, Garage Capital, and strategic angel investors, according to Carkner. He declined to disclose exactly how much was raised, but said the company intends to raise another round of funding that will help grow its headcount from below 10 employees to around 40 by the end of Q1 2026.
Dominion Dynamics’ platform connects off-the-shelf sensors across land, sea, air, and space into a data fabric for coordination and data sharing across allied networks. Carkner claims Dominion will be able to create a mesh network to detect vessels in the Arctic within 12 to 18 months. This network should come at a lower price point than a modernization of the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD), he claimed.
The Arctic is “very difficult to operate in, and quite frankly, without some very exquisite systems like NORAD, it’s basically unmanned,” Carkner said.
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Carkner told BetaKit that Dominion is looking to operate similarly to American defence tech giant Anduril. Rather than dealing with specific procurement orders from the government, Dominion will anticipate and build the defence tools it thinks will be required in the future, then sell them to the government when ready.
“We are ultimately planning on building a sovereign defence prime [contractor] for Canada [that] can compete with the American primes and European primes,” Carkner said.
Dominion is looking to benefit from the increased venture and government defence tech spending that has been happening over the past year, such as Prime Minister Mark Carney’s commitment to spending five percent of Canada’s gross domestic product (GDP) on defence by 2035. Isabelle Hudon, the president and CEO of the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), told BetaKit earlier this week that the Crown corporation is gearing up to serve the country’s defence tech sector in “a less shy” and “more aggressive way.”
“It’s not a new industry to our team, but there’s obviously an inflection point in Canada politically, and [in the] military strategically,” Carkner said, pointing to increased NATO spending guidelines. He added that the call to rearm the Armed Forces was “very, very clear.”
Demand for space dedicated to defence tech testing, like the ATC, continues to grow as well. Ottawa-based defence tech VC firm One9 and local economic development agency Invest Ottawa struck a partnership this week to open its research and development complex Area X.O up to defence and security startups. Toronto asset manager Kensington Capital Partners acquired the VC business of One9 earlier this year to capitalize on the defence sector’s tailwinds.
Feature image courtesy Arctic Training Centre.