Dominion Dynamics closes $139M funding round with Canadian defence firms in spotlight

Dominion Dynamics founder Eliot Pence speaks at the 2026 Toronto Tech Week Homecoming conference in Toronto, on Wednesday, May 27, 2026. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sammy Kogan

A defence technology company that has helped protect Canada’s north revealed Tuesday that it recently added another asset to its arsenal: $139 million.

Dominion Dynamics claims the cash it raised forms the largest Series A funding round for a Canadian defence company ever and will help the burgeoning Ottawa-based firm expand rapidly.

“It feels good … but funding doesn’t mean the party stops,” Eliot Pence, the company’s founder and chief executive, said. “It means you’ve got to accelerate and you’ve got to prove things out at scale.”

Dominion Dynamics, which was founded in June 2025, is best known for AuraNet, a network of sensors and a map-based platform that can collect, trace and transmit information from remote regions with no or patchy cell service.

The Canadian Rangers — a part of the military stationed in isolated and coastal regions — used the technology earlier this year in the High Arctic, perhaps the country’s harshest environment.

The Series A will bolster AuraNet and help develop Scout, an uncrewed, AI-powered drone Dominion Dynamics is building to operate independently or alongside fighter jets. It will be deployable to environments too dangerous or remote to risk sending pilots into.

“Canada desperately needs more autonomy in its armed forces and we are going to contribute one piece of that with Dominion Scout,” Pence said.

“We have a 30,000 sq. ft. factory (in Kanata, Ont.). We’re probably going to go find a 300,000 sq. ft. factory in either Montreal, Toronto or Ottawa, or frankly even the West Coast, where we can hire not just hundreds but thousands of people.”

The technology they’ll be building is important for three reasons, Pence argues.

The first is “whenever you can take a human out of the loop, where you’re risking their life, is a good thing.”

The second is Canada is a vast place with more than 200,000 kilometres of coastline. Protecting the nation means keeping tabs on every inch of it, which is made a lot easier when you have help from technology.

The third, Pence said, is “Canada has underinvested dramatically in its military for the better part of half a century,” arming it with old equipment and legacy boats and planes.

He argues the country can and should do better, especially after meeting NATO’s two per cent of GDP defence-spending benchmark and committing to reaching five per cent by 2035.

Investors are waking up to that thinking. Though some still have ethical qualms about investing in defence companies, Pence didn’t find it hard to attract cash amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Iran conflict and the U.S. inspiring every nation to rethink sovereignty and security.

“It feels like an inflection point, not just in the country, obviously for the business,” he said. “It’s critically important that we have investors that are willing to take a swing for the fences.”

The round of financing he drummed up was led by Toronto-based venture capital firm Georgian Capital.

OMERS, the Business Development Bank of Canada, Royal Bank of Canada and existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and the British Columbia Investment Management Corp. are among the group that provided funding.

The Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association’s data suggests only four other Canadian companies have managed to raise more for their Series A, a term used to describe a startup’s first significant round of venture capital financing, which is typically meant to help a company scale.

Toronto-based login management firm 1Password garnered US$200 million in 2019, while Borealis Biosciences, a Vancouver firm working to treat kidney disease, raked in US$150 million in 2024, the CVCA data shows.

Rounding out the pack is LayerZero Labs, a Vancouver-based blockchain company, which raised US$135 million in 2022 and Element AI, a Montreal-headquartered artificial intelligence firm that attracted US$102 million in 2017 and has since been acquired by ServiceNow.

Dominion’s C$139 million Series A means the company has now raised C$169 million since launching in June 2025.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 30, 2026.

Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press