Anduril Faces A New Rival From The North
In a Nutshell
Elliot Pence, a former Anduril executive, founded Dominion Dynamics to build a Canadian-owned defense prime focused on Arctic autonomous systems. The company is deploying mesh networks, drones, and ice-burrowing sensors like Echo to monitor Canada’s vast northern territory. The effort aims to shift Canada from a history of canceled defense projects to producing world-class indigenous military technology and reduce reliance on U.S. contractors.
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Canada's growing defense industry has seen funding for defense and procurement increase under the Prime Minister. Dominion Dynamics CEO Elliot Pence is also the newest member of the Prime Minister's US trade advisory council. There are very few technology options for operating in the extreme conditions of the Arctic environment.
Dominion Dynamics says it has the technology to keep watch over Canada's Arctic.
My name's Elliot Pence. I'm a Canadian and we're building a defense prime in Canada. Dominion is focused on a couple of things, but the main thing is autonomous systems across Canada's vast landscape in the Arctic. We do that through drones, through placement of different nodes and sensors, and we're already doing it. We've been alive for about 10 months. So, this is going to be our drone factory. We're going to produce a few other things. It's 30,000 square feet and we're building something called an autonomous collaborative platform that flies in teams alongside manned systems. So, a fifth generation fighter, if you want to extend the capabilities, you have drones fly alongside it.
For Canada, that's highly relevant because it's 200,000 km of coastline. So, your ability to see and do across the vast landscape really matters. And so, that's what we're building. It's called Dominion Scout. Canada has a very rich history of defense innovation. In the '60s and '70s, in this region, they built the first third-generation fighter, they built the fastest battleship, they built first two operational drones ever made. And so, what we're trying to do with Dominion is pull Canada forward to what it was before.
Canada also has a long and proud tradition of fumbling those wins. In 1958, it built one of the fastest military jets on Earth, the Avro Arrow. A year later, the government decided it wasn't worth the money and had every single one destroyed, putting the company that built it out of business. A decade after that, Canada built the fastest warship of its kind on the planet, the HMCS Bonaventure. Same story, too expensive, scrapped. So, yes, Canada has had the juice before. It just keeps blowing the lead.
Canada does, in fact, build world-class defense tech. Flight simulators, robotics, satellites. What it doesn't have is a Canadian-owned prime that builds the big things like Lockheed or Anduril do back in the States. Even the country's number one defense company, General Dynamics, is American. That's what Elliot is trying to solve.
The Prime Minister said 75% of what we spend on defense goes to American companies. And he wants to change that to 75% Canadian companies.
What made you feel like you needed to start Dominion? You were born and raised in Canada, right? Yeah, born and raised in Victoria. Very proud Canadian. I have lived in the States for 20 years. Just felt like, you know, after Trump got elected, that there was a moment and that we were going to take you guys. Isn't that crazy? Yes, it is crazy, but it's also something that Canadians and Canada needs to respond to.
Before this, Elliot worked for this guy, Palmer Lucky, as one of the company's earliest business hires, expanding its operations across three continents. I was at a company called Anduril Industries for 4 years and I'm trying to bring some of those lessons up to Canada. We're sort of saying, "Look, we have the talent, we have the IP. What we've been missing is the doing." So, you know, we're deployed with the Rangers right now in the Arctic. Our mesh network, AuraNet, is being deployed with the Canadian military on Ski-Doos across 4,500 km of the Northwest Passage.
What's some of that technology and what's some of the feedback they've given that's helped you guys? In short, what it is is a distributed attributable mesh network. So, it allows the Rangers to communicate when there's no backhaul or GSM or any other communications infrastructure. So, a commander in Ottawa or Canada can look in near real time and see where his Rangers are and whether there's ice or there's literally a polar bear that's ambling around. And you'll see later something we built called Echo.
Echo is a tool that burrows through the ice. It drops a hydrophone in the water. It listens to what's happening. It's also a repeater and distributes it across the mesh network. So, we're listening for adversarial subs, but it's also about capturing data about what climate change is doing to these regions.
To see Echo in action, we needed to find ice. So, we drove even further north to Golden Lake. After my beautiful producer called every bait and tackle shop in town to find a spot frozen enough for us to safely romp on. The guy who answered our call happened to be the most Canadian man alive. And you live nearby? Live nearby. I lived here our whole lives. A family farm. We have cattle just up the road and it's a great place to be.
This device is one of a kind, quite literally. This is the only Echo that exists. And sure, it looks a little janky, but if Dominion gets this right, thousands of them could be monitoring every corner of the country for bad guys. Kind of like IKEA, huh. So, the whole premise is we're trying to do passive sensing, just listening to what's going on underneath with hydrophones. Anything that's detected underground, there's a computer inside that's doing that processing and it will send it back over Starlink connection. So, a lot of the anomalies that we're trying to catch like submarines, a lot of that data is classified. And so, our approach is well, if we could detect sounds that are widely available like whale noises, once we've proven that out, then they could give us the classified data to train on. Within 90 days, we it went from conceptual design to actually proving this out on Lake Ontario.
Dominion's whole pitch is defending the Canadian way of life. Turns out the most convincing version of that pitch is just fishing and drinking with Russell. Sitting in a shack Russell built with his own hands, drinking beer together. Ripping around on his Ski-Doo, I felt the real weight of Dominion's mission. This place in all its frozen glory is what they're protecting.
Do you think much about the tech scene here? Mostly not. No. Yeah, really I don't. I stick to myself and enjoy my time out here and time on the farm and time with family.
Can you please retell the story about your old house? Cuz this is beautiful, but you had one before. I was moved up north for work and my brother likes to come out here on weekends and doesn't like to clean up or look after things and he let it freeze in over the year and I came home and all I was left with was the floor. The walls were ripped off and yeah, so I had to build a new one.
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