Innovator journeys: Sapper Labs
Video / July 12, 2025
Transcript
Identifying malicious cyber actors remains a constant threat. The Innovation for Defence Excellence and Security program, or IDEaS, is spurring Canadian industry to accelerate research and development for defence and security priorities, including in the cyber domain. IDEaS has completed an 18-month Test Drive with Sapper Labs to develop an advanced cyber attribution technology that could help the Canadian Armed Forces identify malicious cyber actors. Identifying these threatening activities allows for the arrest and prosecution of perpetrators.
This Test Drive allowed the Canadian Armed Forces to collaborate with a Canadian innovator in developing technologies that could identify cyber threats specific to misinformation.
Through a Test Drive, the IDEaS program acquires an advanced prototype solution so that the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces can assess the readiness of the product in a real-world environment for a military audience, taking it through the final stage of the innovation journey.
So we're able to take something at a fairly low level of technical readiness and bring it up into essentially complete operational readiness by the end of the project and do that within a very short period of time and very effectively.
Sapper Labs received 1.2 million dollars in initial IDEaS funding to develop the system which can be customized to unique mission requirements. Then, their solution was selected for an additional 7.5 million dollars to complete the Test Drive. The IDEaS program gives Canadian innovators access to funding and feedback from defence and security experts to develop solutions that inform decision making for current and future military challenges.
Through the Defence IDEaS program, working in cyber defence and the intelligence realm, we were able to interact directly with the defence teams, and specifically the cyber and intelligence groups, so we were able to produce a much better outcome then what we would do on our own.
While there are a multitude of innovation programs across Canada, what makes IDEaS unique and specifically beneficial for the Canadian Armed Forces is that it’s a Government of Canada program, and it allows us to access innovations that are at an early technology readiness level, and then further collaborate with those innovators to develop those technologies so that they can move to a later stage of technology readiness.
The results of IDEaS Test Drives show that given the right support, innovators like Sapper Labs can quickly progress their technology through the defence and security innovation pipeline and provide solutions to complex issues such as cyber attribution, ultimately benefitting Canadians.