Martello Defence Partners
We build defence businesses inside established Canadian companies.
A new revenue line in defence, built onto what you already do.
Canada has committed to more than tripling the size of its defence industry this decade, and it cannot do that with the companies already in it. Most of the capability it needs is sitting in businesses that sell to energy, mining, telecommunications and industry — and have never had a reason to look at defence.
If we have already sent you something about your own company, replying to it is the fastest route.
The opportunity
Defence is buying capability you already have.
Requirements are written in defence language. Your capability is described in the language of the market you actually sell to. Nothing in between translates the two — so a company can be an obvious fit on the technical merits and never once appear as one.
There are good reasons for that. The work is complex, the consequences of a supplier falling short are serious, and the market has built careful ways of finding people it can rely on. Those channels run between parties who already know each other, which they do well. What they are not built to do is find capability that has never announced itself.
What it takes
Finding the opportunity is the first step.
Registrations, certifications, clearances and supplier listings all exist, but which of them you need depends on the route and the customer. A subcontract to a prime, a direct standing offer, an innovation contract and an allied placement each carry a different set, in a different order, over a different period. Some opportunities need very little. Others take two years before a dollar arrives.
Identifying the right path is where the work starts. What follows it is the build itself: capacity, people, capital, and sustained management attention running alongside an established commercial business.
This is why most of our work is done jointly. You keep doing what you already do well, and we carry the rest of it.
Three ways we work
The right structure depends on what you want.
Which one fits depends on what you want for the business, and on how much of the build you would rather not carry yourself.
We own it together
We build it with you
A jointly owned venture builds and runs the new defence line alongside your business. We bring the market knowledge, the qualification work and capacity. You bring the capability that made the opportunity real in the first place.
- Government programmes meet a substantial share of the build cost, non-dilutively
- The venture is its own company, so what it takes on sits separately from your existing business
- Your commercial business is untouched and stays entirely yours
- Built in defined stages, so progress and value are visible at each one
A substantial share of a business you would not have built alone.
We own it
We buy the business
A route to an exit, on a timeline you set, for a business that keeps going afterwards.
- Fair value for what you have built
- Your people keep their jobs and the business keeps its name
- Held and grown, not broken up or resold
- Stay on as long as you want to, or hand it over
Value realised for you, continuity for everyone else.
You own all of it
We help you do it
Some companies want the route opened, not a partner. We do that work and step back, and everything we build stays yours.
- Qualification and accreditation
- Prime and supply chain access
- Programme funding, applied for and administered
- Cleared and specialist people placed
Straightforward, and often the right answer.
Whichever one fits, the first piece of work is ours. No retainer to hear an idea, no exclusivity on a first conversation, and nothing to sign before you know what the opportunity actually is.
What it is worth
A defence line changes what the business is worth, not only what it earns.
Most owners think about a new revenue line in terms of revenue. The more consequential effect is often on the value of the whole business, and it can work three ways at once.
The revenue itself, added to a business that already has some. The margin, where the work is harder to displace and therefore less exposed to price competition than commercial work usually is. And how the business is valued over time, because revenue that runs for years and is difficult for a competitor to take is worth more than revenue that is re-competed annually.
It is worth having that number in front of you before anything else gets decided.
The market
The reason this revenue holds is the same reason it is hard to reach.
Canadian defence is not one market with one way in. It is nine connected parts — who buys, how they contract, what pays for development, the primes and the obligations they carry, allied and European routes, and the policy that moves all of them. Each has its own rules and its own conditions for entry, and learning one teaches you little about the next.
That structure is why so few companies are in it. It is also why work here is re-competed in years rather than quarters, and why a competitor cannot simply undercut you on price next quarter. The barrier that keeps you out is the one that holds your position once you are through it.
Getting through it once is a known problem. We have the structure laid out.
How we work
You see the opportunity in full before you commit to anything.
What the opportunity is, who is buying, when, what it could be worth, and what capturing it would realistically take. Once that is on the table, the question is simply which structure suits you.
What comes first
What is actually in one of these.
Before any conversation about structure, you get a short written reading of one specific opportunity we think fits your company. There is no fee for it and nothing is being pitched. This is what it contains.
- What we noticed
- Your capability, in your own terms rather than ours — what you make, what it does, who already buys it. If we have misread your business, this is where you will see it in the first ten seconds.
- A named opportunity
- A specific requirement or programme, the department or prime that buys it, the route in, and the published dates. Named, not a category. You can go and check it.
- Where the revenue could come from
- Each separate line the opportunity could produce, and a range for what they might be worth together in a year. Ranges rather than a single figure, and labelled as estimates, because at this stage that is honestly what they are.
- What it could do to the value of the business
- Included only when the effect on what the business is worth is larger than the revenue itself, which is often the more consequential number. We do not put a figure on what your business is worth today.
- Funding that could pay for it
- The federal and regional programmes that apply to this particular route — what each offers, who is eligible, and where to read the terms. Most owners have never heard of them, and they are usually the most interesting page.
- What it would involve
- What may be required, how long it realistically takes, and the first practical step you could take next week. If something takes two years, it says two years.
What we do
How we can help.
- Partnership
- A jointly owned venture that builds and holds the new defence line. Where the opportunity is larger than a company can take on alone, this is usually the honest answer, and it is where most of our work sits.
- Acquisition
- A purchase of the business at fair value, held and grown rather than resold. A route to an exit for an owner who wants one.
- Market and supply chain access
- Positioning against a live requirement, introduction into prime supply chains, and matching against industrial participation obligations that primes are contractually required to place in Canada.
- Qualification and accreditation
- Registered, cleared, certified and listed — on whichever path your opportunity actually requires, which is often shorter than people expect and occasionally much longer.
- Programme funding
- Federal, regional and export programmes identified, applied for and administered. Non-dilutive money that directly reduces what you have to put in, and usually the most interesting page in any plan we write.
- Talent
- Cleared and specialist people placed, where the binding constraint turns out to be people rather than capability or capital.
Allied markets
One qualification, several buyers.
A defence line selling to one department is a small line with a long sales cycle. Canadian qualification is frequently the entry ticket rather than the destination.
Europe has become the most consequential part of that. Canada signed a Security and Defence Partnership with the European Union in June 2025, and in 2026 became the first non-European country admitted to the EU's Security Action for Europe instrument — a €150B facility financing joint procurement across the European defence industrial base. Canadian companies and Canadian-made products can take part as contractors and subcontractors, on conditions that are worth understanding properly before building a plan around them.
Alongside that sit NATO supplier arrangements, allied primes discharging their own offset obligations in Canada, and sales to foreign governments through the Canadian Commercial Corporation, which contracts as prime on a Canadian supplier's behalf. These buyers decide on timetables independent of one another, which turns a single long wait into several shorter ones.
Working with us
A few things we hold to.
We do not compress timelines. If something takes two years we say two years, and if it can be done in three months we say that too. You cannot plan against an optimistic number.
We name the downside before you ask. What it costs, what could fail, what it would take to stop, and what you would be left holding if it did.
We see it through. Once we start on something with you we stay with it — through the qualification, the applications, and the stretches where nothing appears to be happening.
Nothing we propose locks you in. No exclusivity on a first conversation, no retainer to hear an idea, and clear points in any structure where you can step away without argument.
The market
How the Canadian defence market is put together.
Nine connected parts. This is the structure any supplier has to work inside, and it is worth understanding before deciding whether there is a route for your company. Select any part to see how it works.
Select any part of the map above to see how it works and what it means for a supplier.
Not sure where your company fits?
That is the first thing we work out, and we do it before asking you for anything.
Is this you
What makes an opportunity worth pursuing.
A few things have to line up. They are questions about the opportunity itself rather than about the industry a company happens to sit in.
What we look for
What a real opportunity looks like.
Opportunities differ enormously. The same company can be a strong fit for one programme and no fit at all for the next, so these are worth revisiting rather than answering once.
A clear demand signal
A named programme, buyer or route with a published requirement and a timeline behind it — rather than a general expectation that defence will need something like this eventually.
A credible match to what you can supply
What you already do, or what you could do with adaptation you would recognise as reasonable. Most opportunities need some modification. Very few need reinvention.
A route that is open to you
Demand on its own is not enough. There has to be a mechanism you can actually use to supply it, with a first step that exists today.
Worth your attention
That one is yours to judge. What reads as marginal to one company is a step change for another, and it depends on where you are trying to take the business.
Where demand is
The ten capabilities Canada has said it intends to build.
The Defence Industrial Strategy names ten key sovereign capabilities — areas where Canada wants to hold the capacity itself rather than buy it abroad. They were chosen partly on the basis of being a Canadian strength or having the potential to be one. That second clause is the useful part: it is the government stating publicly where capability is wanted and does not yet exist.
Aerospace
Platforms, avionics and aircraft communications. Reaches well past the aerospace sector itself into precision manufacturing, electronics, software and maintenance.
Ammunition
Common ammunition, battle-decisive munitions, small arms, missiles and bombs. Energetics, propellants, metal forming, precision machining and the plant to make them at volume.
Digital systems
Secure cloud, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and communications, integrated command and control, high-assurance communications. The broadest of the ten, and where most commercial software and data businesses already sit.
In-service support
Keeping naval, land and air fleets serviceable. Maintenance, repair and overhaul, spares, technical publications and engineering support — work that runs for decades and closely resembles what industrial service businesses already do.
Personnel protection
Protective equipment and medical countermeasures. Materials, textiles, life sciences and manufacturing to controlled standards.
Sensors
Marine sensors, quantum sensors and electronic warfare. Radio frequency and signal processing, photonics, electro-optics and the components inside them.
Space
Space-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, space domain awareness, satellite communications and launch. A small domestic base and a stated intention to grow it.
Specialised manufacturing
Land vehicles, surface ships including icebreakers, and marine systems. Heavy fabrication, structures, qualified processes and the supply chains underneath them.
Training and simulation
Naval, land and air training. Synthetic environments, simulators, courseware and instructional delivery.
Uncrewed and autonomous systems
Uncrewed land, aerial, surface and underwater systems, including collaborative platforms. Airframes, payloads, autonomy software, control systems and counter-uncrewed capability.
Who we work with
You will probably recognise your company here.
Established, with a real capability behind you — a product, a process, an engineering strength — that your customers value and would not find simple to replace.
Big enough to take on new work without it destabilising the business, and small enough that the person who decides is the person reading this.
Canadian-incorporated, with the work done in Canada. That is what most of these programmes and obligations actually turn on, and Canadian ownership counts for more under the current strategy than it used to.
And an interest in defence revenue: either a first position in the market, or growing a small one into a line of business that matters.
About
Close to the requirements, and to the companies meeting them.
We work out where a Canadian company’s existing capability fits what defence is actually buying, what that could be worth, and what it takes to get there — including the funding that can help pay for it.
We do this across a number of companies rather than one engagement at a time. A great deal of what defence needs is already being built well by companies whose main business is somewhere else — industrial, energy, communications, manufacturing. Where we build something with a company, we stay with it. The arrangement is set up so that our interest and the owner’s point in the same direction over a long period, which is the only basis on which work like this holds together.
Founder
Ian Watt
Ian founded Martello after more than twenty-six years across enterprise technology, federal programme delivery and the defence sector.
His commercial background is in software and systems. He has directed high-technology product development for international aerospace and defence customers, managed enterprise software implementations for Fortune 500 clients, and led multi-million dollar software development and systems integration projects. He led the delivery of the federal Rehabilitation Services and Vocational Assistance Programme for Veterans Affairs Canada — a multi-year initiative of approximately $40M, coordinating over 120 resources and more than 300 staff.
He serves as an officer in the Canadian Army Reserve, with more than twenty-six years in uniform including a deployment to Afghanistan advising the Afghan Ministry of Defence on strategy and policy.
The name
Why Martello
Martello towers were small, plain coastal fortifications, built quickly and in numbers along the approaches that mattered. None was impressive alone. Together they covered a coastline no single fortress could have held.
That is roughly the idea. A number of capable businesses, each holding a position that is hard to displace, worth considerably more together than apart.
Partners is meant literally. The work we like best is the kind where we are building something with you and share in how it turns out — the same risk, the same exposure, rewarded on the same success.
Contact
Start a conversation.
If we have sent you an analysis, reply to it directly. Otherwise, write and tell us what your company does — that is enough to begin.
Get in touch
Ian Watt
contact@martellopartners.com
Copied.
National practice, working with companies across Canada.
What a first conversation looks like
It goes both ways. We will want to understand the business — what you make, who buys it, what you do that would be hard to copy, and where you are trying to take the company. And you should push us on the opportunity: why we think it fits, what the route actually involves, what it would take from you, and what we would be doing versus what you would.
No term sheet, no valuation of your company, no percentage, and no lawyer. None of that belongs in a first meeting.
And if there is nothing here for you, we will say so quickly rather than take up more of your time.