Hello to Canada’s SaaS and AI Community,
Canada’s defence build-out is creating an opportunity that reaches well beyond traditional defence companies. Software, AI, autonomy and cyber are becoming part of the country’s sovereign capability, and some of the technology Canada needs may already be under development inside its startup ecosystem.
That creates a question for our community: could defence be a market for what you’re already building?
It’s one of the reasons we launched DEPLOY, a new one-day summit taking place November 5, Day 2 of SAAS NORTH AI.
Key takeaways:
- Defence is increasingly a software and AI opportunity.
- Dual-use can create a new growth path for commercial founders.
- Canada wants more defence capability built and owned here.
- DEPLOY focuses on three barriers: Build, Fund and Sell.
Co-Founder/Producer, SAAS NORTH Conference Editor, SAAS NORTH NOW
For years, SAAS NORTH AI has brought together founders building Canada’s next generation of technology companies. As we looked at where those companies could find their next major markets, defence became increasingly difficult to ignore.
Canada is undertaking its largest military build-out in generations. Its first Defence Industrial Strategy commits $6.6 billion over five years to strengthening domestic capability, with an ambition to increase the share of federal defence contracts awarded to Canadian firms from 43% to 70% by 2035.
Meanwhile, founders are paying attention. A June 2026 report from BDC and The Icebreaker surveyed 642 Canadian small and medium-sized businesses and found 374 were actively looking to enter defence.
The opportunity is real but so is the uncertainty around it.
“Canada’s defence build-out is real, and a lot of our best founders are quietly asking whether they belong in it,” says David Tyldesley, Co-Founder of SAAS NORTH AI. “They haven’t had a straight answer, or a room of their own to find one.”
DEPLOY was created to build that room.
Defence Doesn’t Have To Mean Becoming A Defence Contractor
For many SaaS founders, defence still evokes large prime contractors, lengthy government requirements and procurement processes that can take years.
That model exists for good reason. Warships, aircraft and other large integrated systems require a level of systems integration that an early-stage company cannot provide.
The opportunity DEPLOY is exploring is narrower and, for our community, potentially much more interesting.
Software, AI, autonomy, cyber and sensing increasingly form another layer of modern defence. These are also areas where Canadian startups already build commercially competitive technology.
That means the journey doesn’t necessarily begin with a government specification.
A founder might already have commercial customers and a proven product, then discover that the same technology addresses an operational problem in defence.
This is the central thesis behind DEPLOY: Canada has an opportunity to build part of its defence industry the way it built its technology industry, founder-first.
As Eliot Pence, Founder and CEO of presenting partner Dominion Dynamics, puts it:
“Canada’s next generation of defence technology will be built by ambitious entrepreneurs. DEPLOY exists to help them scale globally while strengthening Canada’s sovereign industrial capabilities.”
Start With The Problem, Not Procurement
One of the biggest distinctions between commercial SaaS and defence is how founders need to think about product-market fit.
DEPLOY calls it product-problem fit.
A founder entering defence might assume the first task is understanding procurement. In reality, there is a more fundamental question to answer first: does your existing technology solve an operational problem that someone actually needs solved?
The distinction matters.
A technically excellent product can still be irrelevant if it doesn’t map to a recognized capability requirement. The technology should therefore be the starting asset, not the end of the conversation. Founders need to understand the problem, the end user and the outcome their technology enables.
Only then does the question of how government buys it become useful.
Dual-Use Changes The Economics
This is also why dual-use sits at the centre of the DEPLOY thesis.
Building exclusively for defence can create a difficult equation for an early-stage company. Sales cycles are long, buyers are specialized and betting the survival of a startup on one government contract creates obvious risk.
A dual-use company approaches the problem differently.
It builds technology with a genuine commercial market while developing a defence application alongside it. Commercial revenue can sustain the company while defence relationships mature, giving founders more room to prove capability without depending entirely on government revenue.
For a SAAS NORTH AI founder, that may be the most important connection.
The question isn’t necessarily whether you should pivot your SaaS company into defence. It may simply be whether the technology, expertise and IP you already own have applications in a market you haven’t seriously considered..
Keeping More Of The Opportunity In Canada
There is a national dimension to this opportunity too.
DEPLOY’s thesis is explicitly founder-first: where possible, Canadian entrepreneurs should be able to retain their companies, intellectual property and customer relationships as they build defence capability.
That doesn’t mean large primes disappear. They remain essential to major integrated defence systems, and startups will continue working alongside them.
The narrower argument is that the software and AI layer creates more room for entrepreneur-led companies to build valuable capability while retaining ownership of what they create.
Dominion Dynamics offers one example of the scale this new generation of companies can reach. The Ottawa-based company builds Arctic surveillance systems for the Canadian Armed Forces and raised a $139-million Series A in June 2026, bringing its total funding to $169 million.
The goal is to create more pathways for companies like it to emerge.
“Canada’s defence sector is in a genuine period of growth,” says Sam Witherspoon, CEO and Co-Founder of Anvil. “Opportunities that bring our technology and investment community together make the whole ecosystem stronger, which means more talent, more jobs, and more capability that stays here instead of going elsewhere.”
Build. Fund. Sell.
That brings us to what DEPLOY actually is.
Ottawa already has defence trade shows, procurement briefings and policy forums. We aren’t trying to recreate them.
DEPLOY is designed around the questions technology founders encounter when considering defence, in the order they tend to encounter them.
Build: Does defence have a problem your technology can credibly solve?
Fund: Who is financing Canadian defence and dual-use companies, and what do those investors need to see?
Sell: How does the market buy and where can an emerging company realistically begin?
That sequence is intentional. Procurement matters but founders first need a useful capability and enough capital to survive the journey. The program therefore starts with the company rather than the system around it.
Why DEPLOY Belongs At SAAS NORTH AI
Perhaps the easiest option would have been to build a completely separate defence conference.
We chose not to.
DEPLOY sits inside SAAS NORTH AI because we believe there is meaningful overlap between the founders who have spent years building Canada’s software economy and those who could help build its next generation of defence capability.
A company developing AI for logistics, autonomy for industrial operations, cybersecurity for enterprises, advanced sensing or decision-making software may already possess technology relevant to defence.
Its founders may simply not think of themselves as defence founders yet.
DEPLOY is for those deciding whether they belong in this market, those taking their first steps into it and those already building who want to go further.
As Dave puts it:
“That’s what DEPLOY is: founder to founder, honest about how hard this is, and useful whether you’re deciding to enter or already in and looking to go further.”
Not every AI-SaaS company should enter defence. For those with technology that maps to a real operational problem, however, the opportunity is becoming increasingly difficult to overlook.
On November 5, we’re bringing the founders, investors and operators exploring that opportunity into the same room.