Dominion Dynamics raises $21M to build Arctic surveillance mesh networks for Canada's Rangers

could definitely be a real factor.

Cool. Well, we I believe we have Elliot in the restroom waiting room a little bit early. I see no reason not to bring him in as long as he's ready to hop into the TVP Ultra Dome.

Let's do it.

Well, we bring him in. How you doing?

What's happening?

Hey, guys. How are you?

Uh great to have you on the show. Uh would love a quick intro on yourself and the company.

Sure. Nice to meet you guys. Uh Elliot Pence. Uh so founder uh CEO of Dominion Dynamics. Uh Dominion's building tri distributed treatable mesh networks in the Arctic uh amongst other things. That's kind of the wedge in

uh very interesting. How how do you start uh what brings you to building something like this?

Look, the Arctic is a a huge challenge as is very clear uh over the last couple of months. It's been kind of at the foreground of geopolitics. Canada has underinvested in securing the Arctic. Awareness is core to securing it and we're building for that. So, we started in June of last year and have built about a dozen products, deployed them a few times and about deploy them again in uh just outside of the Northwest Passage. So, the the highest north up.

Very cool. So what what does this actually what does it actually look like in practice? These are hardware hardware that is being deployed but but give me give me a sense of of it uh more practically.

Yeah. So it's basically it's us building on top of C's system. So we're not building the hardware.

Okay.

Uh we're using radios that are you know from meshtastic to persistent systems to uh goenna to syllabus. We build software that sits on top of that RF uh that allows rangers, which is Canada's kind of reservest forth that exists across the country, but in particular in the Arctic to capture more information from uh their environments. Allows them to take videos, to take pictures, to do voice notes. We compress that information down and then manage that across a mesh network. And then we reinflate that data when it gets to a a satellite back haul and push it up into a common operating picture.

Very interesting. So what give me give me a sense of how how the rangers even approach trying to secure and understand the Arctic. I imagine it's like one ranger for every, you know, multiple thousand square miles. Like it's not very large area. I imagine they can't have uh people everywhere.

Yeah. Yeah. This is the fundamental challenge, right? There's 5,500 rangers across the country. Canada has a coastline of 200,000 kilometers. Their principal um task is they do a sort of anomaly detection patrols every other week. And on those patrols, they're often out for sort of 48 hours looking to see if they can find anomalies, whether that's like on roads, whether that's in the water, drones in the sky, but they're radioing that stuff back and they're capturing it in kind of an analog way. What we're building is a way for them to capture all that data, store it, and then to start thinking about, okay, well, what are some predictive uh processes that we could build into this uh this community of 5,500 reservists? Do they do they uh do they roll as kind of like a little squad or is it just like one guy out there on a boat just like

like uh Yeah, you can I can just imagine, you know, a a movie of like, you know, lone ranger. It's one guy out there just going crazy in the wilderness thinking that uh

uh

they roll deep. It's like 30

30 per patrol. Uh and then you know they're doing this all the time.

Yeah. So

what kind of so specifically the anomalies that they're looking for is that uh like foreign intrusion like surveillance.

It's a mix of it's a mix of things, right? It's like, you know, is a road block that's critical for a community.

Um you know, a few years ago we had a Chinese balloon that really nobody knew about for a while. There's uh indications that there's buoys in uh some of the the channels uh up in the Arctic. So, it's it's both strategic and just tactical of like how do I get to where I need to be going in an emergency.

Is the buoy like a like the Chinese weather balloon story where you just kind of like send it off and you know collect whatever data you can basically

effectively right. I mean, part of what what we believe is happening

just outside of the Arctic is they basically put buoys in currents that brings it through

the Arctic and they're just sucking up information about what is the operating dynamic like? So, we we want to be ahead of that and we want to

Is that like is it like how how thick the ice is? So, if you brought an icebreaker ship, like how big would that ship need to be? How many would you need to get through to bring a warship through or something like that? Just strategic intelligence.

Yeah. Honestly, I'm not sure why, but

but that's one possible reason. If you were in charge, you'd be doing that. Makes sense.

Uh why why this market? How does this how does this fit? It's it's like uh beautifully niche in that uh you know, probably somewhat of a small market initially, but you can probably saturate it and then expand from there. But uh but why yeah, why specifically the the Rangers? Well, a few. So, the Rangers was were the sort of least um technically advanced group, but they had the hardest problem set.

Um, and you know, for Canada and for the NATO alliance, the Arctic is becoming really quite critical. And so it's sort of niche right now, but it also gives us sort of a a good user community to build a useful product and have an extreme delta, like an extreme effect on. So we want to build, you know, broader than just that community, but that's a good starting point.

This is like the iPhone moment for the Rangers, [laughter]

right?

Where are you building the company? Where are you based? Where's the team based? What's hiring look like?

Yeah, so it's a very Canadian company. It's deliberately Canadian. Uh company is headquartered in Ottawa. We have offices in Kingston, Toronto, and Ottawa.

Yeah.

Um I'll be based in Ottawa. I've been based in the US and DC for

for the past 20 years. Uh it's backed principally by Canadians as well.

Yeah, I saw.

Um but uh but yeah.

Yeah. Uh what about uh hiring? Is is is Canada caught up to America with the defense tech fervor? The the Palmer Lucky podcasts have not reached Canada yet.

They get stopped at the border.

Yeah. [laughter] Yeah. I mean, but seriously, like like where are you recruiting from? Uh who who what type of people are you recruiting? I mean, is there this idea of like serving the national interest, working in government technology that might be slower? There might be it might be harder, might be longer hours, might be more technical, but there's some sort of light at the end of the tunnel in terms of impact.

Yeah, there's no TBPN in Canada yet. Um, [laughter] but uh

this interview is making me feel like TBPN is the TBPN for Canada.

Yeah, we got North America. I know Carney is not making it seem like we're all big one one big happy family the last 48 hours, but we're still in our in our in our world. We're still family. We're good.

We're still family.

So So Canada has not caught up on the defense tech sort of surge. Yeah,

that's kind of what we're looking to catalyze. Mhm.

I would say that when we raised our

preede,

um, we had, you know, literally hundreds of Canadians that are working at US companies come back up and want to build something for sovereign capability or sovereign capacity. So, you know, and there's an immense amount of talent in Canada.

Yeah.

Like the Waterlue Quador is ridiculous.

Um, talk about the process of actually selling into the government and how it's different. I think most people will be familiar with the American defense tech arc of uh SBIR's program of record, how you kind of sell into the US government, the department of war. What's different? What's similar? How are you thinking about the market?

Well, the the thing that's similar is they have a version of SBIR in Canada. They call it ideas.

I would say it's a little slower, a little less money, a little less diverse. Sure.

But it still sort of doesn't get you into a program of record. So, you still need to figure out how do you get into those kind of longtail contracts.

Um, what's different with Canada, and this is changing right now, is there's no version of an OTAA.

There's no other transaction authority. So, you can't getting onto a contract is a real challenge. And that's what we're hoping to

to change and catalyze and lobby for because without the ability to get on contract, this market doesn't make sense for anybody. Uh, government knows it and uh is trying to change it.

Yeah. So, uh, it's a very Canadian company, but is this just a foothold and then ultimately you'll sell to folks in Alaska, Greenland, maybe the Nordics? Like, uh, where do you see this going over time? Is it like if you can do it in Canada, you can do it anywhere?

Yeah, the basic logic is this is the hardest operating environment on Earth. If you can build tech that works in the Arctic, it will be valuable to everybody, the US, Europe, NATO allies. Yeah,

it doesn't matter. I don't want to build just a Canadian company just focused on Canada. Yeah. This is a Canadian company focused on the world.

Yeah. What does the supply chain look like? I mean, you mentioned that you're you're partnering with like Got Tenna and building on top of a lot of things. Does that make it less capital intensive and you you you do need to build stuff on top of it, but it looks more like software teams, engineers, and you're maybe able to match it with the money that's coming from the government on the sales side.

Yeah. Yeah, we're definitely software first. Uh there is a supply chain in Canada. It is pretty extensive. It's actually built pretty

I mean most of Canada's defense hardware is American about 80% of it and so they're integrated into large American platforms.

Yeah.

Um but we are a software first company. Um we're taking a similar approach to a lot of the other neopimes where you start off with software, you realize you need to do hardware, you vertically integrate, you push platforms, that sort of thing.

Yeah. What what's exciting on the connectivity side? Um obviously the Star the Starlink story is big. Is is that the main driver of uh of progress there? Are there any other uh connectivity stories that you've been benefiting from?

Well, one of the challenges is that Starling isn't so the polar orbit doesn't have a ton of star sat

I didn't realize

the polar orbit sucks, right? Like there's nobody that really does polar orbit.

And so that's actually what we're solving for. We're solving for localized connectivity.

Okay. Starlink, Aridium, One Web, there's a Canadian company called Telesat. They're all kind of coming up there, but the connectivity still sucks.

Interesting.

And that like that's across like it affects, you know, your localization, your PNT, how you move autonomous systems. So connectivity is a real challenge.

Yeah. Do you have an idea of uh how Astronis fits in here? I know that they do geostationary large satellites for internet. They were putting one over Taiwan and they were putting one over different countries. Is is that something that they could track? I mean, obviously we can ask it from them directly, but I'm wondering if you've gone down that rabbit [clears throat] hole.

Yeah. No, we're we're going down that rabbit hole now. There's a bunch of new providers and I think the the satellite problem will be solved over the next five years, but like five years is a long time.

Yeah, that's great news. Well,

we got to hit the gunk. Tell us how much

What's the biggest What's the biggest seed round in Canadian history?

I think it might be the second biggest Canadian seed round in history. Definitely the biggest in defense.

Well, this is going to be the biggest gong hit in Canadian history, I [laughter] think. So, like how much? $21 million. Boom. There we go. Uh, great to meet you. Uh, thank you so much for coming on and, uh, yeah, glad glad you guys are focused on the Arctic, cultivating Arctic power.

Keep us safe.

Thanks for having me, guys. Great to meet you.

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