StartWell sat down with Eliot Pence, founder and CEO of Dominion Dynamics, during Toronto Tech Week. He came straight from the airport.
Founded on June 6, 2025, Dominion Dynamics is positioning itself as Canada's first true national defense systems integrator — the kind of company that every NATO country has except us. Not a component supplier, not a subcontractor, but the organization that pulls it all together. Their focus is a dual-use, persistent Arctic sensing network that integrates sensors across all domains — land, sea, air, and space — into a sovereign data fabric that secures Canada's north and closes a critical intelligence and command-and-control gap in the region.
Eliot knows what a high-velocity defense company looks like from the inside. He joined Anduril Industries as one of its very first business development hires, built the company's international go-to-market strategy from scratch, and scaled teams across three continents — shaping how Anduril grew into one of America's most consequential defense technology companies. He subsequently served as Chief Business Officer at Osmo and Cambium Biomaterials before founding Dominion. He holds an M.A. from Yale and a B.A. from the University of Victoria.
What makes this moment different is that the conditions for building this company have finally aligned. Government procurement is being reformed through a new Defense Investment Agency. The Prime Minister has explicitly signaled a preference for Canadian suppliers. Venture funds that previously couldn't invest in defense have rewritten their mandates. And a generation of ambitious Canadians who built careers at places like Anduril, Tesla, and Google are ready to come home.
Dominion's team already includes veterans of Anduril, Amazon, Google, and the Canadian Armed Forces, combining Silicon Valley speed with Waterloo-grade engineering and a deep national security focus. The capital and the customers are starting to show up. The talent, Eliot says, was never the problem.
*Advice Eliot offers in this episode:
- Getting from an idea to a company requires passing through conviction first, then finding a sense of mission — once you feel like you have to do it, the path gets clearer.
- Don't write memos about the change you want to see. Start the company that demonstrates it's possible.
- DM founders directly. Eliot raised seed capital by reaching out cold on Twitter to Canadian tech founders. It worked.
- You can't build a Canadian company without living in Canada.
- The constraint in Canada isn't talent — it's capital and belief. The people are here and ready.
- The government needs to learn to be a good customer to early-stage companies. Procurement speed is the unlock for the whole sector.
- Look at what Canada has done historically in defence — passenger jets, early drones, autonomous submarines — and use that as a confidence baseline, not nostalgia.
