January 21, 2026 A new Ottawa-based defence startup founded last summer by former Anduril executive Eliot Pence has raised $21 million CAD in seed funding as it works toward becoming what Pence calls a Canadian “defence neoprime.” Including earlier capital, Dominion Dynamics has now raised $26 million since launching in June.
The latest funding round was led by Georgian Partners, with participation from British Columbia Investment Management Corporation (BCI) and Silicon Valley investor Bessemer Venture Partners.
The size of the round stands out in a Canadian startup market where early-stage fundraising has slowed sharply. Pence said the deal was heavily oversubscribed, though he declined to disclose Dominion’s valuation.
For Georgian Partners, the investment represents a strategic expansion into defence technology, an area the firm believes is poised for long-term growth as governments rethink security and supply-chain dependence.
Georgian partner Margaret Wu described the investment as a “pathfinder deal,” allowing the firm to back emerging sectors earlier than its traditional growth-stage focus. The firm has previously made similar early bets in frontier technologies, including quantum startup Xanadu and AI chipmaker Tenstorrent.
Pence brings experience from one of the defence industry’s fastest-growing players. Before founding Dominion, he led international go-to-market efforts at Anduril Industries, the California-based defence contractor known for autonomous weapons systems and military surveillance software.
That experience shaped Dominion’s strategy, Pence said, particularly around how defence products are adopted.
“Product and tech don’t necessarily win. Political access, funding, and management of ecosystems win,” he said.
Dominion’s timing coincides with a major shift in Canadian defence policy. In November’s federal budget, Ottawa committed $82 billion to defence, including funding vehicles aimed at supporting domestic suppliers through initiatives such as the Defence Industrial Strategy and a new defence platform within the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC).
Winning Canadian government contracts remains a hurdle, as Ottawa has traditionally relied on U.S. defence suppliers. Pence has said he wants to reverse that pattern by building a domestic prime contractor capable of delivering both software and hardware systems.
For now, Dominion is starting with software. Its first product, Auranet, is a data platform designed to connect hardware sensors into a unified monitoring system for remote regions, with an initial focus on Canada’s Arctic. Canada lacks “a system for generating data, capturing that data in a repository, and drawing insights from that data” in the North, Pence said.
Auranet has already been deployed twice and is set to be used during the Canadian Armed Forces’ Arctic exercise Operation NANOOK in February. “In the event of some sort of conflict, we can look at what happened in the past and build predictive models that help us anticipate future problems,” Pence said.
Dominion currently employs nearly 20 people and plans to spend 2026 focused on research and development rather than near-term revenue. The goal, Pence said, is to build the foundations of a multi-division defence company capable of scaling into a full prime contractor over time.
