Ottawa Tech News: Q1 Roundup
Inside the deals, launches, and partnerships that defined Q1 in Ottawa Tech.
Fundraising & Acquisitions 🚀
Dominion Dynamics closed a $21M CAD seed round led by Georgian, with BCI and Bessemer participating. The Ottawa “defence neoprime” is also setting up a 25,000 sq ft factory in Kanata as it scales operations.
Backboard.io, the new venture from Assent co-founder Rob Imbeault, raised an undisclosed pre-seed round co-led by Mistral Venture Partners and N49P, with Garage Capital and DevCap participating.
Imbeault says it’s one of the largest Canadian pre-seed rounds in recent years.
Backboard is building a portable memory layer for LLMs and ranks #1 on the Long Conversational Memory benchmark.
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In the News 📰
Dominion Dynamics committed an initial $50M in March to build Canada’s first sovereign Autonomous Collaborative Platform, an uncrewed wingman for next-gen fighter jets. It also launched AURION in February (an open-source platform aggregating federal procurement and lobbying data for Canada’s defence SMEs) and partnered with Calgary’s Denvr in late March to build a sovereign AI simulation environment for the ACP program.
Solink had a packed quarter: published its State of AI in Retail research at the NRF retail conference (Jan), launched Solink AI Agents at its Secure Summit in LA (Feb), and opened a Toronto office (Mar).
Telesat signed a January cooperation agreement with Korea's Hanwha Systems on sovereign satellite connectivity, then added 500 MHz of military Ka-band to its Lightspeed LEO constellation in March. First Lightspeed satellites launch this December.
Calian Group mobilized an initial $100M CAD through its new Calian Ventures arm to build a sea-to-sea-to-sea network of C5ISRT defence labs, drawing capital from Calian, regional investment agencies, and federal programs.
It also announced a March partnership with Quebec’s Tessellate Robotics on autonomous Arctic navigation tech.
Kinaxis brought on Razat Gaurav as CEO on January 12, then commercially launched Maestro Agent Studio in early March, a no-code platform for building AI agents inside its supply chain orchestration product.
ARCHIMEDES, the national health data platform led by the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, partnered with Ottawa-based Woodway Assurance to embed automated privacy risk assessments into its datasets.
Woodway also rolled out EviData 2.0 in February with a new AI companion for de-identification workflows.
dominKnow named Geoff Surkamer CEO in January and launched AI Translator on its main platform in March, with Pfizer among early customers.
Achievements 🥇
Solink won The Global AI Awards for Best Computer Vision & Video Analytics.
New Opportunities 🚀
Calian Ventures is accepting SME applications across command and control, autonomous systems, and space resource orchestration. Register here.
Dominion Dynamics is hiring engineering and operations talent across Ottawa and Toronto, as it scales after its $21M seed roundis. See open roles.
Upcoming Events 👇
🔎 May 7th
Topic - What’s Broken in Canada’s Startup Ecosystem? A Public Discussion
Co-Host - Deloitte, Technology Fast 50
What’s actually broken Canada’s early-stage startup ecosystem? And what does a healthier ecosystem look like?
Join us for a candid, open discussion on what’s really going on for founders and investors in Canada right now, and where things need to change. No polished answers. Just an honest look at the challenges, the trade-offs, and what could actually move the needle.
Speakers:
Jesse Wiebe, Founder & Executive Director, Canadian Startup Capital Association
Caroline von Hirschberg, Co-CEO, Spring Activator
Suzanne Grant, Executive Director, Capital Angel Network
Moderated by: Darryl Bandoro, Tech Thursday Ottawa
🔎 May 21st
Topic - Tech Thursday at MASHUP26: Pitch Fest Happy Hour
We'll be at the 16th Capital MASHUP26 Pitchfest, presented by Capital Angel Network (CAN) and TCC Canada.
250+ founders, investors and leaders are celebrating entrepreneurs & their champions - connecting in a genuine vibey mode. It’s giving - off the charts energy, the right people in the room, the best founder : investor ratio you’ll find, and a track record of on the spot and follow on investment.
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