Ottawa defence-tech firm H2 Analytics lands $800K federal grant

H2 Analytics, an Ottawa-based defence-tech company, secured $800,000 in non-dilutive funding from FedDev Ontario last week to expand its international reach and upgrade its AI-powered Exercise Architect Suite platform.

The company, founded in 2017 by former military veteran Hugo Hodgett, builds realistic intelligence simulations used by the Canadian Armed Forces and other military customers. Revenue has climbed more than 550 per cent over the past three years, and H2 has nearly doubled its headcount to 47 employees in the last six months.

Hodgett said the funding will help the company hire skilled Canadians and accelerate development of EASE, which allows users to design and manage complex training exercises with multilingual coordination and improved system performance.

"This funding will help us hire highly skilled Canadians while accelerating the next phase of EASE development. It's an important step in scaling Canadian-built software that supports operational readiness," Hodgett said in a statement.

Hodgett pointed to the federal Defence Industrial Strategy as evidence the government is serious about boosting contracts with domestically owned businesses. H2 Analytics has been self-financed for most of its existence, with defence-sector venture capital historically scarce in Canada. "Defence was a dirty word in VC in Canada. That has, in theory, changed," Hodgett told the Ottawa Business Journal.