Rachel Clark has spent enough time inside large systems to know when one is starting to break.
Rachel Clark,
“Cybersecurity has a real scalability problem.”
SKADI Cyber Defense
She began her career in the 1980s, working on inertial navigation systems for United States military submarines while serving in the Navy and Marine Corps. Later, she held senior IT security roles at Universal Music Group, Hyundai Canada, and spent nearly a decade in banking, building threat detection analytics capabilities. Across those sectors, one problem kept showing up.
“What really became apparent for me through all these experiences is that cybersecurity has a real scalability problem,” Clark said.
Within enterprise and the military, threat intelligence is produced constantly. New reports lead to new detection rules, which trigger more alerts and even more tuning. Entire teams are needed just to manage the noise. While large organizations staff for that complexity, smaller companies simply don’t have the capabilities to manage the process, full stop.
“If you’re a small or medium-sized business, you can never hope to defend against these things,” Clark said. “There’s a real poverty line between big organizations who can afford to put people, processes, and technology in place, and small and medium-sized businesses who can’t.”
So, Clark left her role as an IT security leader and set out to address the scalability problem she kept encountering. The outcome was SKADI Cyber Defense, where she is founder and CEO.
SKADI has developed a system capable of reasoning about cyber threats the way humans do, but at machine speed. Clark describes it as an “ontological brain” that understands relationships, content, and causality.
Traditional cybersecurity systems define threats by matching activity, such as employee logins, against predefined indicators, and if enough boxes are checked, an alert fires. But real-world behaviour is messier. As Clark puts it, “all environments are different,” which means activity that looks benign in one system could signal trouble in another.
SKADI’s approach focuses on understanding what is normal within one environment and identifying when something deviates in a meaningful way. By resolving alerts using its ontological system, rather than human review, SKADI cuts through a process that often takes four hours.
“[Our] mean time to resolution is 3.4 minutes,” she said. “It’s a dramatic departure from where things were before to where things are now. We close 99.6 percent of the alerts that we get into the platform autonomously, without human intervention.”
Still, building SKADI wasn’t easy. Clark was acutely aware of how few women-led cybersecurity companies existed in Ontario. She also founded the company in Muskoka, ON, which isn’t necessarily known for tech.
The motivation to stay there was partly personal, and partly strategic. Muskoka is close to Northern Ontario, a region closely tied to Canada’s critical industries, like mining. It’s also where infrastructure, defence, and cybersecurity risks increasingly intersect. But building a tech company there was also Clark’s own statement about where innovation belongs.
“If I can’t do it here, if I can’t start a female-led company and make demonstrative change in the AI and cybersecurity space, then I don’t want to do it,” she said.
Last year, Clark’s determination carried her toward the Cyber Challenge – a free program from Rogers Cybersecure Catalyst delivered in partnership with the Canadian Cyber Threat Exchange (CCTX) and supported in part by the Government of Ontario, designed to help Ontario-based startups tackle industry-specific obstacles and transition them into market-ready solutions across seven key sectors: smart infrastructure, mining, law enforcement, agri-food, advanced manufacturing, and life sciences.
“If I can’t start a female-led company and make demonstrative change in the AI and cybersecurity space, then I don’t want to do it.”
Rachel Clark,
SKADI Cyber Defense
The program begins with a prep stage in which founders identify and validate a concrete cybersecurity challenge, culminating in a pitch that determines entry into the second stage. In the final three months, stage 2, selected startups receive $20,000 in non-dilutive funding and participate in an intensive cycle of mentorship and curated programming, working closely with industry experts to refine go-to-market strategies, strengthen sales messaging, and address complex challenges such as IoT security, supply chain integrity, and data privacy.
Its mining challenge was a natural extension of the work SKADI was already doing.
Mining added $23.8 billion to Ontario’s gross domestic product in 2023, and is one of the top economic underpinnings of the province’s northern communities. In this sector, information technology and operational technology are deeply intertwined, and protecting one without the other can leave gaps that carry real-world consequences.
“Cybersecurity isn’t just about protecting an organization from some financial impact,” Clark said. “It becomes infinitely more serious when you’re talking about mining and defence, because a cyberattack could kill somebody.”
Through the Cyber Challenge, SKADI was introduced directly to mining operators, engineers, and businesses. Those introductions became conversations that shifted how SKADI thought about applying its technology, and accelerated relationships that would have taken years to develop independently.
SKADI also gained $20,000 in non-dilutive funding from the three-month program, and it isn’t alone. Cyber Challenge alumni have collectively raised nearly $3 million in investment since fall 2024. But one of the most important outcomes from the program for Clark was gaining a network of mentors and peers, some of whom now sit on SKADI’s advisory board.
“In the end, it wasn’t so much about the technology for me, personally, it was about the connections I made with people and how we—the 10 companies who participated in the Cyber Challenge—still talk to one another,” Clark said.
By the time SKADI completed the program in December, Clark no longer viewed her company as a startup. The team had grown to seven, the customer base had expanded to roughly 50 organizations, and revenue is now tracking toward seven figures.
Perhaps more significantly, SKADI’s participation in the Cyber Challenge clarified how its technology could be applied in real-world, industrial environments.
For Clark, programs like the Cyber Challenge create space for founders who might otherwise be excluded. She is candid about the responsibility she feels as a woman building in this sector.
“When I started my business, the government came to me, and they said, ‘Rachel, do you know that you’re one of only 19 women-led companies in the cybersecurity space in Ontario?’” she said. “That’s not acceptable.”
Early-stage, underrepresented founders like Clark are often forced to make high-stakes decisions with little room for error, and many of them don’t get much help. It’s why she believes structured access to expertise, industry context, and peers can change the trajectory of a company at the moment it matters most.
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If your company is up for the challenge, applications for the final Cyber Challenge cohort (kicking off this May) are open until February 16. Don’t miss your opportunity to make an impact on Ontario’s cybersecurity trajectory, apply now.
Feature image courtesy Rogers Cybersecure Catalayst.