🛡️ ONE9: The Firm That Built Canada’s Defence Venture Market
Before defence tech was cool, before the money showed up, before Ottawa said the word “sovereignty” out loud, there was ONE9.
Editor’s note and disclosure: The Icebreaker’s co-founder Matthew Lombardi recently joined ONE9, the security and defence investment platform of Kensington Capital Partners Limited. The Icebreaker and ONE9 already co-founded and co-chair CANDIN, Canada’s Defence Investor Network.
🎯 Why this issue exists
Every week we report on Canada’s defence rebuild: the half-trillion-dollar commitments, the rearmament from 28th place, the founders and funds finally showing up. But readers keep asking the same thing: who actually built the private capital side of this ecosystem?
This is the reference piece on ONE9, Canada’s first national security tech investment and innovation platform.
🍁 First in, when nobody wanted in
ONE9 wasn’t founded during the 2025 defence boom. It was founded in 2013 by Glenn Cowan while he was still serving in Joint Task Force 2 (JTF2), Canada’s tier-one special-mission unit - the Canadian peer of the units that produced the operators now founding America’s biggest defence-tech companies.
Glenn didn’t parachute into defence from finance; he came up through the sharp end of it. A retired JTF2 Squadron Commander, he spent his career on special operations: combat tours in Afghanistan, sensitive missions across the Middle East, and hostage-recovery operations in Africa. He built ONE9 on a conviction that is now his team’s motto: venture capital is a special operation — small teams, asymmetric bets, mission first.
That operator background is the sourcing and diligence edge. ONE9’s partners are the end-users the technology is actually built for, which is why they can tell a demo from a deployable capability before an LP dollar moves.
In March 2022, three years before Ottawa rediscovered defence, ONE9 launched Special Mission Fund I with Shopify co-founder Daniel Weinand as General Partner, anchored by Kensington Capital Partners Limited, the only institutional investor willing to back defence at the time, and backing from investors including Shopify President Harley Finkelstein. Harley “backed ONE9’s defence-focused fund in 2022, when few Canadian investors wanted anything to do with the sector.”
And the portfolio performed like a firm that knew the terrain before the hype cycle arrived: Tomahawk Robotics (exited to AeroVironment in 2023), Strider Technologies, goTenna (acquired by Forterra in 2025), Hidden Level, Slingshot Aerospace, North Vector Dynamics, Stirling X. Counter-UAS, secure comms, space domain awareness, intelligence - the exact categories every generalist fund is now scrambling to enter, ONE9 underwrote years ago.
🏛️ Institutional firepower: the Kensington platform
In 2025, Kensington Capital Partners acquired ONE9. Today, ONE9 is Kensington’s security and defence investment platform: one brand spanning three integrated arms — venture investing (with institutional backing from AGF Capital Partners), ONE9 Capability Labs (the operational and value-creation arm), and its Arctic joint venture, Sapujjijiit. Kensington manages roughly C$2.1B across venture, growth, and mid-market buyouts, is majority-owned by AGF, and is building a scaled defence franchise.
Translation for LPs: special-operations sourcing and battlefield validation, wrapped in institutional-grade investing infrastructure and a ~30-year GP track record. That combination doesn’t exist anywhere else in Canada.
And the platform just gained a new steward. In July 2026, Kensington named Saar Pikar — former head of venture and growth at OMERS — as President, reporting to CEO Tom Kennedy, with direct oversight of the venture and growth business, including ONE9. One of the country’s most senior institutional venture investors is moving from OMERS, one of Canada’s largest pension investors, where they funded deals such as Dominion Dynamics and Cohere, to oversee Kensington with defence and security venture investing squarely in the mandate.
🧠 The powerhouse task force
Defence investing is a full-contact sport, and ONE9’s bench is unlike anything else in this country.
Since joining Kensington, Glenn now leads a deep team alongside a roster of strategic advisors and consultants with diverse backgrounds and long demonstrated track records of performance strategically located across the globe.
George Hoyem spent 15 years as EVP of Investments at In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s strategic venture arm, personally leading 40+ investments; he joined ONE9’s Investment Committee in 2025. When the man who helped the CIA pick winners for a decade and a half chooses a Canadian platform, that tells you where the puck is going. His recent essay on NATO decoupling from US defense tech is required reading:
Rounding out the team: A US Naval Academy graduate, former US and UK naval aviator and the founder of a $300M corporate venture platform. A retired Tier 1 US Army special operations soldier who started in the 75th Ranger Regiment, deployed 20+ times across the Middle East and North Africa, served through the August 2021 Kabul evacuation, and holds a Bronze Star with “V” device.
And of course Michael Smith, a serving reserve officer in the CAF Judge Advocate General branch — you’ve seen him in op-eds, and this month on the Canadian Army’s official podcast, on how international humanitarian law shapes the weapons Canada develops and fields:
No other Canadian platform can put special operators, a CIA-affiliated venture veteran, a corporate VC builder and two of the country’s most senior defence statesmen.
🌍 Forward-deployed in Europe
While many global investors read about the European rearmament cycle, ONE9 lives in it. Glenn was the sole private investor on the Canadian delegation at the NATO Defence Industry Summit in The Hague, sitting in roundtables with Defence Minister David McGuinty and Procurement Secretary Stephen Fuhr.
And this spring, Glenn went further forward than any Canadian VC: ten days across Europe, including time embedded with the Canadian-led NATO Multinational Brigade in Latvia, on the alliance’s eastern flank. That’s the drone-saturated, electronic-warfare reality of modern land combat, seen up close, on the exact ground where Canada’s soldiers are deployed and where the next generation of battlefield technology is being proven or discarded in real time. ONE9 holds a permanent forward operating presence across the fastest growing defence market on Earth. Deal flow follows presence. Presence follows commitment.
🔬 Capability Labs: the value engine
The go-to-market motion for startups is unique in defence. Capability Labs, ONE9’s innovation hub and venture studio, builds security-focused companies against validated end-user demand, runs innovation-as-a-service for public-sector partners, operationalizes capabilities, and supports startups through the valley of death between demo and deployment.
And the Labs has real receipts. Take Dominion Dynamics, the Ottawa company whose Arctic “digital fence” we watched span 5,200 km on Op Nanook, whose Arctic Training Centre partnership we covered in September, and which went on to close the largest defence Series A in Canadian history (C$139M, 2026). Before that mega-round, a Kensington fund backed Dominion’s seed, and ONE9 Capability Labs housed the company, supported its early innovation, and helped it recruit transitioning Canadian Armed Forces veterans. That’s the Labs model working as designed: capital, space, and operator talent at the earliest and riskiest moment, not innovation theatre.
The Labs model is also why ONE9 joined forces with Invest Ottawa to open Area X.O to defence entrepreneurs, plumbing the national ecosystem directly into its pipeline.
🧊 The North is not a metaphor
Sovereignty talk is cheap; ONE9 builds in the Arctic. Glenn partnered with Harry Flaherty, CEO of Qikiqtaaluk Corporation, to create Sapujjijiit Inc., Canada’s only Inuit-majority-owned, full-spectrum Arctic defence company, in which ONE9 Capability Labs is a full partner. It’s a working channel between the defence tech sector and northern and Indigenous businesses. In a procurement environment where Arctic capability and Indigenous partnership are both strategic and mandated, ONE9 is the only venture platform with that channel built. A testament to being early in the Arctic is that ONE9’s portfolio company goTenna/Forterra was the first wireless mesh communication network deployed to support emergency management in Nunavut:
🤝 The network is the moat
ONE9 co-founded and co-chairs CANDIN, Canada’s first and only private capital network for defence and security, modelled on peer groups across the US, Australia, and AUKUS. The firm’s reach runs from JTF2 alumni networks to In-Q-Tel’s Rolodex to NATO’s industrial machinery. Even ONE9’s comms game is levelling up:
💰 Bottom Line
Canada’s defence rebuild needs a private capital champion with operator DNA, institutional backing, allied networks, and a decade of receipts.
ONE9 didn’t join the defence tech wave — it spent thirteen years building the beach the wave is now breaking on. If you’re a founder building sovereign capability, an LP seeking exposure to the most durable spending cycle of our generation, or an ally looking for Canada’s serious people, you now know where to find them.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.