This Founder Left Washington To Defend Canada's Arctic

Eliot Pence is the founder and CEO of Dominion Dynamics, a company on a mission to become Canada's national defense systems integrator. Founded on D-Day 2025, Dominion is building a dual-use, persistent Arctic sensing network — integrating sensors across land, sea, air, and space into a sovereign data fabric that closes a critical intelligence and command-and-control gap in Canada's north.

Before founding Dominion, Eliot was one of Anduril Industries' very first business development hires, where he built the company's international go-to-market strategy from scratch and scaled teams across three continents. He also served as Chief Business Officer at Osmo and Cambium Biomaterials, and as a senior director at McLarty Associates in Washington DC. He holds an M.A. from Yale and a B.A. from the University of Victoria.

In this conversation recorded at Startwell during Toronto Tech Week, Eliot breaks down why Canada has never had a true systems integrator, what's broken in government procurement, and why the moment to build is right now. We get into the geopolitics of the Arctic, how modern warfare is changing, and why Canada's AI talent is punching way above its weight globally.

Topics: Arctic defense, NORAD modernization, government procurement, Canadian defense industry, AI talent, venture capital in defense, warfare technology, systems integration, quantum computing, sovereignty

Chapters: 00:00 – Intro: Who is Eliot Pence? 01:15 – What is Dominion Dynamics? 04:07 – How Canadian defense procurement works (and doesn't) 09:30 – Canada's defense industrial base 11:00 – From idea to conviction to mission 15:18 – The Arctic domain awareness problem 19:50 – NORAD modernization and Canada's gaps 26:36 – Canada's AI talent and the hiring landscape 30:05 – Lessons from Africa on entrepreneurship 41:00 – How modern warfare is changing