New fund allows Bay Street to invest in Canada’s national security

A new venture fund led by a co-founder of Shopify Inc. and a retired squadron commander from Canada’s Joint Task Force 2 is aiming to bring cutting-edge national security technologies to Bay Street.

A new venture fund led by a co-founder of Shopify Inc. and a retired squadron commander from Canada’s Joint Task Force 2 is aiming to bring cutting-edge national security technologies to Bay Street.

One9 Venture Partners announced the launch of its Special Mission Fund I on Tuesday; it’s Canada’s first venture capital fund that focuses on national security technologies and critical infrastructure.

“The world now has overlapped with a new national security -- and civilian, commercial and corporate security is interwoven to traditional national security. We want to achieve scale with our companies through commercial application,” said Glenn Cowan, founder and chief executive officer of One9, in an interview Thursday.

Cowan has a distinguished military background. He served in Afghanistan in 2002 and has spent a substantial amount of time in the military as a tactical commander. He retired from duty in 2016 after sustaining an injury on the job and began building One9.

“We understand where folks are around the world and the types of problems they’re working on. What we’ve seen is we’ve had a front row seat for many years to inbound security threats to governments, to academia, to companies, to institutions and we’ve solved those problems. So we kind of see the trends ahead of the rest of the world tracking these inbound security trends and we’re using technology to solve those problems,” Cowan said.

“In the military, in my former career, there was no incentive or requirement to monetize or commercialize the technology and that’s where One9 is working with founders and the national security end-users to really develop those key cutting edge technologies.”