Utilizing proprietary drone armament, surveillance, and AI technology to advance Canada's sovereign defence capability — built by Indigenous hands for a safer nation.
Coastal Defence Systems Inc. (CDSI) is Canada's only Indigenous security and defence company developing proprietary drone armament, surveillance, and AI technology for Canada's sovereign defence needs.
Operating at the intersection of Indigenous economic reconciliation and national security, CDSI is positioned to serve Canada's rapidly expanding defence procurement mandate — with a target of 70% of federal defence contracts going to Canadian firms within a decade.
"Canada must invest in its own defence industrial base — building sovereign capability that serves our security needs and strengthens our economy. Indigenous-led innovation is central to that future."
— Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada
Canada's only Indigenous-led defence drone company, advancing economic reconciliation through sovereign technology.
Platforms and AI systems directly addressing NATO's identified critical capability needs for detecting and defeating unmanned systems at platform and swarm level.
CDSI's AI architecture follows a graduated autonomy model — analogous to SAE self-driving levels — where AI agents recommend before they command. Currently operating at Level 1, with AI agents providing detection and alerting while humans retain full decision authority. Advancing toward agent-recommended actions through safety-gated progression.
Human makes all decisions. System identifies and notifies.
AI recommends actions. Human approves operational response.
System executes low-risk actions in specific conditions.
Fully autonomous in constrained environments with safe fallback.
Robust decisioning across all environments and adversarial conditions.
Gossip-style distributed protocols for propagating swarm state and membership signals without centralized control — enabling detection of swarm splits, merges, and suspicious membership claims.
AI agent fusing telemetry, communications patterns, and behavioral data to attribute swarm membership and detect anomalies — sitting above signed identities, not replacing them.
Every agent recommendation is structured-logged against outcomes, building proprietary decision datasets and SOP intelligence that compounds over operational time.
NATO stakeholders have identified coordinated UxS swarms and the technologies needed to detect and defeat unmanned systems at both platform and swarm level as critical capability needs. CDSI's Thunder Class platform and AI swarm-identification work directly addresses this gap.
Canada's new Defence Industrial Strategy mandates domestic procurement with an explicit Buy Canadian directive for drones, sensors, and strike systems. A new Defence Investment Agency (October 2025) centralizes procurement, creating a direct pathway for Indigenous-owned, Canadian-built UAV platforms.
Command and control systems integration partner, enabling advanced mission management and real-time operational coordination for CDSI's Thunder Class platforms.
AI drone development partner focused on advancing CDSI's agentic-first autonomy architecture, swarm identification protocols, and AI attribution layer development.
Dedicated aerodrome partnership in Liverpool, Nova Scotia providing test, demonstration, and operational launch facilities for CDSI's Atlantic coastal defence operations.
Nova Scotia, Canada
Atlantic Coastal Operations Zone
Liverpool Aerodrome
Liverpool, Nova Scotia, Canada