Canada’s cybersecurity startups have no room for error

Daly Brown and Nick Foubert built a company around their defence expertise, before finding the support to scale it.

Daly Brown spent more than a decade in defence, building battlefield networks and aerospace systems designed to work when failure isn’t an option. Now he’s applying that expertise to Canada’s critical infrastructure.

“These are high-consequence, high-stakes environments where functional safety is paramount.”

Daly Brown,
Metropolitan Technologies

His Ottawa startup, Metropolitan Technologies, co-founded with longtime colleague Nick Foubert, has developed a platform designed to securely connect industrial systems in sectors like mining, energy, water treatment, transportation, and manufacturing. When those essential systems—the ones we rely on every day to keep the lights on, the water clean, and the goods moving—fail or get compromised by a cyberattack or security breach, people can get hurt.

“These are high-consequence, high-stakes environments where functional safety is paramount,” said Brown.

If building a startup is hard, building a cybersecurity startup is harder still. The product has to work, but proving that takes time. Even once you do, finding product-market fit—who to sell to, how to reach them, and how to earn their trust—takes longer.

For Brown and his team, figuring out how to navigate these challenges was just as important as building the product. “It’s a long sales cycle involving long-term relationship building, and it’s not going to happen overnight.”

Brown and Foubert are recent graduates of Rogers Cybersecure Catalyst’s Cyber Challenge, an eight-month program for cybersecurity startups in Ontario.

Delivered in partnership with the Canadian Cyber Threat Exchange (CCTX) and supported in part by the Government of Ontario, the Cyber Challenge is designed to help startups transition from obstacles to market-ready solutions. The program…

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