Black Flight - Cohort I

Vimy Forge’s inaugural cohort is named Black Flight, in honour of the all-Canadian B Flight of No. 10 (Naval) Squadron, Royal Naval Air Service. Recognized in 1917 for its distinctive all-black Sopwith aircraft, Black Flight is remembered above all for its disciplined innovation, rapid adaptation, and decisive operational impact.

  • An offline, on-device voice-to-text and data-structuring platform for military frontline and training use, synchronizing securely to Canadian Protected-level cloud when connected. Used with elements of the Canadian Army and Navy.

  • A defence-focused AI company automating CFITES compliant military training development and sustainment. Its secure, human-validated platform generates job task analyses, training plans, lesson plans, and assessments from source documents in hours, with full traceability and deployable cloud or air-gapped options.

  • A marine robotics company (founded 2001, Burnaby, BC) that builds fuel-cell-powered autonomous underwater vehicles for long-range, long-endurance missions. Its Envoy and Guardian platforms support under-ice ISR, subsea monitoring, mine warfare, and infrastructure inspection.

  • A Toronto-based engineering firm developing an autonomous amphibious Arctic logistics vehicle to move personnel and supplies from AOPVs to unprepared shorelines and inland areas. The platform uses electric drive with a propane range extender and supports autonomous, remote, or crewed operation.

  • Prodigy develops an AI/ML decision-support system that analyzes behavioural indicators of deception across video, audio, and text, producing probabilistic deception estimates. Models are trained on tens of thousands of deceptive and truthful instances. Field-relevant prototype (TRL 6), intended for counterintelligence, HUMINT/tactical questioning, and screening workflows.

  • A data intelligence focused team building deployable, containerized C4ISR platforms (Port Watch, Arctic Watch, Mother Earth Watcher). It fuses hydrophones, LIDAR, AIS, drones/ aerostats, and environmental sensors with digital-twin generation and Command Sphere decision support; TRL 6, early revenue.

  • Creators of policy-driven enclave-as-a-service that deploys governed workspaces inside a customer’s cloud in under an hour. Enclaves enforce identity and data-access controls with auditability and compliance with SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001; currently with 24 production customers and 100+ production enclaves.

  • A space technology company developing a patented, parameter-driven time-synchronization framework that coordinates zero-time reference points without GNSS, Earth-based signals, or atomic clocks. It targets assured timing for PNT, resilient comms/encryption, and distributed C4ISR in signal-denied or deep-space environments (TRL 3).

  • A performance apparel and textile company developing smart textile systems for defence and dual-use. It integrates advanced materials, embedded sensors, thermal management, and biomonitoring into field-ready soldier soft goods, with established domestic manufacturing capability and TRL 6 smart-textile development.

  • A UAS engineering team that has developed Eagle Vision, a passive EO/IR counter-UAS system detecting, tracking, and classifying micro/mini drones by aerodynamic airdisturbance signatures. Runs on rugged GPU edge compute, integrates with C2 workflows, and was field-tested at DND/CAF IDEaS CUAS Sandbox; TRL 6.

Discover how Vimy Forge’s programming can help you take your defence innovation to the next level.