TORONTO – Team Greypoint (Jordan Khoo, Nicholas Chu, and Eric Buys) has won the first-ever Defence Tech Hackathon, for proposing a unique way to protect Canada’s Arctic sovereignty using Earth observation satellite data. Their solution is to develop a detection system that would predict where unidentified vessels might be heading, and then send this data to distributed drone systems for automated follow-up and enhanced monitoring.
At present, this is just a proposal, but it does exemplify the kind of creative thinking that took place at the Defence Tech Hackathon.
The event was held on Saturday, September 20, 2025, at Toronto Metropolitan University’s DMZ tech incubator (located at Yonge and Dundas Streets). The event was hosted by The Icebreaker, a grassroots organization that is trying to incubate and accelerate a defence tech network for Canada. Support was provided by Build Canada, the DMZ, SkyWatch, and NordSpace (which provided $10,000 in prize money to the three winning teams).
Matthew Lombardi is The Icebreaker’s Co-Founder. “The Arctic is a really important area economically, with northern shipping routes opening up there as climate change is occurring at four times the global rate,” he told SpaceQ. “It’s also an area where a lot of critical minerals and materials exist, which is why China and Russia are positioning themselves to become leaders in the Arctic. Other countries are setting the rules of the Arctic in Canada’s backyard because we lack presence there. Presence starts with the simple ability to monitor the region, which is why we put out a call nationally to young people for ideas.”
The Icebreaker received responses from “about 200 really smart young people,” said Lombardi. Since staging a national competition was beyond its means, it decided to hold a Toronto event on September 20th. “Of the 200-plus folks who signed up, about 35 were able to physically be in Toronto on that specific day,” said Lombardi. “We had eight teams drawn from these 35 people. They were challenged to build an Arctic mesh sensor network that used different forms of available data.”
Team Greypoint won $5,000 for its first place idea.
Second place went to Team Overwatch (Miran Qarachatani, Omid Latifi, Pratik Das, and Adam Wang). Their solution used custom AI-based wake detection to fingerprint ships from raw Synthetic Aperture Radar to help detect or confirm vessel type and size without relying on their Automatic Identification Systems. This team won $3,000.
The $2,000 third place prize was awarded to Team Polaris (Mike Yan, Pier-Luc Nadeau, Mayank Jain, and Rajarupan Sampanthan). They proposed developing a predictive algorithm to detect where vessels should be at a given time and then sending alerts whenever they deviated from those courses.
Matthew Lombardi is very happy with the results from the first-ever Defence Tech Hackathon. “This competition proved that there are lots of young people with creative and original ideas to solve Canada’s defence problems,” he told SpaceQ.ca. “If Canada is serious about quadrupling our annual defence spending and building a sovereign defence capability, we need to provide opportunities for young people who want to build in this space.”