Dominion Dynamics CEO Eliot Pence says Ottawa's procurement policies are often unfavourable for startups such as his.Dave Chan/The Globe and Mail
After meeting with the Prime Minister and embedding in the Arctic with the Canadian Rangers, defence tech company Dominion Dynamics is reconsidering its next steps as it waits for federal procurement processes to catch up.
Dominion had a strong start to the year. But like many Canadian companies, it’s now stuck in a waiting game as industry members say Ottawa’s promised defence dollars and bureaucracy reforms have yet to flow through in the form of contracts.
In January, Dominion announced a $21-million seed round and the third deployment of its sensor network, AuraNet, with the Canadian Rangers, a part of the Canadian Forces reserves that works in rural or isolated regions such as the Arctic.
Then, last week, the company’s chief executive officer, Eliot Pence, sat down with Prime Minister Mark Carney for a candid conversation about Dominion’s technology, which is designed to help detect threats in the Arctic, and the current environment for defence entrepreneurs in Canada.
The discussion on Parliament Hill added to the momentum Dominion has been building since it launched in October, 2025, later bolstered by investments from Toronto venture-capital firm Georgian Partners and pension manager British Columbia Investment Management Corp., among others.
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Mr. Pence said that momentum recently came to an abrupt pause when he was told he would have to go through the Canadian Army’s Director of Land Requirements to pursue next steps for his company, in the form of further deployments and contracts.
After a few successful rounds of gathering feedback and trialling his products with the Rangers, Mr. Pence said the future of his work with the Canadian Armed Forces is now unclear as he faces potentially lengthy procurement timelines and awaits security clearance approvals.
As a Canadian defence tech entrepreneur, Mr. Pence said the country’s self-proclaimed “fair, open and transparent” procurement policies are often unfavourable for startups such as his.
“The framing of procurement today is that it’s fair and transparent. The reality is it’s not fair and it’s rarely transparent,” he said, adding that Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy attempts to fix this but has yet to be fully implemented.
Dominion’s approach to testing and rapid prototyping is inspired by the Ukrainian government’s Brave1 initiative, he said. Through the platform, Kyiv provides financial, organizational and informational support to companies that want to test their technologies, such as robots, weapon systems or uncrewed aerial vehicles, in Ukraine.
“They deploy essentially industry reps on the ground to the front lines. And those reps are building the product on the fly with the soldiers. They end up with crazy useful capabilities,” Mr. Pence said.
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While Canada’s situation and needs are different, Ukraine’s approach to ensuring its military has the equipment it needs is something Ottawa could consider while it works to implement its own Defence Industrial Strategy, Mr. Pence said.
To a certain extent, Canada is already incorporating similar ideas in its practices. Lieutenant-Colonel Travis Hanes, commanding officer of the First Canadian Ranger Patrol Group (1 CRPG), said Dominion is among several companies his group has worked with to test and iterate their products during operations.
“When you integrate at our 1 CRPG level with a company like Dominion Dynamics, and they’re able to solve problems in real time, that speeds up your technological loop. You’re learning faster what your problems are instead of downstream, having to retroactively try to get at some of these things,” he said.
However, Lt.-Col. Hanes said experimentation with 1 CRPG is limited in scale and scope. Being a small unit, companies testing with the group must still ensure their technologies can integrate within the larger system that is the Canadian Army.
Embedding with the Rangers is “a good tool,” he said, “but only if it exists within a bigger, well-thought-out army program.”
Through Dominion’s deployment with the Rangers, Mr. Pence said he learned connectivity in the North is even less reliable than he first thought, and having multiple information sources is critical to feed into a functional, common operating picture. Such lessons will help inform his product development going forward.
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Currently, Lt.-Col. Hanes said, the Rangers use a variety of programs to determine their positioning in the North, from companies such as GPS navigation and wearable-tech maker Garmin Ltd. and navigation platform Gaia GPS. Dominion Dynamics helped his team integrate this suite of technologies to improve their connectivity and risk-assessment capabilities, he added.
Mr. Pence said these deployments aren’t about making money – at least, not yet. The funds raised in the seed round will keep Dominion going for 2½ years, he said, and he intends to raise more. What he needs now from the government is in-year procurement, meaning purchases that can happen within 12 months, and multiyear contracting – in other words, a signal to the venture funds investing in his company that there’s a clear opportunity for it to grow and compete.
“All I need from the government is for them to articulate, ‘Here is how you get from X to Y,’ ” he said.
On the Rangers’ part, Lt.-Col. Hanes said he will continue to welcome collaboration with industry, in the hopes that it leads to clear procurement pathways for those companies with solutions the military can use. “If you want our Canadian companies to be competitive and be the best in the world, it’s based off of feedback.”