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.”

The fund will invest in various companies that can enhance Canadian national security and that support government end users.

Some examples of businesses the fund might invest in include cybersecurity firms, robotics, and autonomous aircraft and vehicles, Cowan said. 

In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, cybersecurity has been thrust into the spotlight, with U.S. President Biden urging businesses to increase their online security defenses because of the potential for cyberattacks on U.S. entities.  

Cowan will lead the fund along with Shopify Co-founder Daniel Weinand.

The fund is aiming to raise a total of $50 million and has secured an anchor investment of $10 million from Kensington Capital Partners, according to the release.

Cowan said the fund is aiming to “validate and demonstrate how we can take technologies that are built in compartmentalized and sensitive government programs and bring them out for corporate use. Or vice versa – work with founders and start-ups to help them penetrate some of these difficult barriers of entry in the government end-users and intelligence and national security space to bring some game-changing technologies to solve some significant problems.”