Adobe tock
A Montreal startup says it can turn months of military training development into days. Now two Canadian investors are putting $1 million behind that claim.
Bloomsco closed a $1-million pre-seed round co-led by BDC Capital and Telegraph Ventures. The company will use the money to build AI tools that turn manuals and doctrine into training for Canadian and allied forces.
“We want to offer military training as fast as the battlefield changes,” said Antonio Spiezia of Bloomsco.
WHY IT MATTERS
Drones and cyber threats are changing the battlespace week to week, while military training systems were built for the slower pace of the Cold War.
Bloomsco already has a customer in the Canadian Defence Academy in Kingston, which is the training authority for the entire Canadian Armed Forces.
The AI runs on-premises in air-gapped environments, which any defence work touching sensitive material requires.
HOW IT WORKS
Training depends on a large pile of source material: equipment manuals, doctrine, old course material, handbooks and interviews with subject matter experts. Today, people sitting in a room organize all of it by hand.
Bloomsco takes in that documentation and builds a competency database. From there it generates courseware, training plans and simulation scenarios, which military experts review before deployment.
“We’re not sending data to California,” said CEO and co-founder Hugh McGuire.
He added that the process still needs careful human input. “Obviously, it’s very high stakes. You can’t just kind of throw together a PowerPoint deck and hope for the best.”
THE PROOF POINT
The company’s first contract was with the Canadian Joint Warfare Centre. It produced a qualification standard and training plan for an officer role.
“We transformed what was going to be months of work ... into essentially a couple of days of work,” McGuire said.
That project led to the ongoing contract with the Canadian Defence Academy. The academy is working toward what McGuire calls a “total learning architecture,” which would shorten the time between new equipment or tactics arriving and a soldier being trained on them.
Picture a soldier whose kit has just been swapped out and who deploys to Latvia on Thursday. That soldier needs the new training tomorrow. “Right now, again, we just don’t have a system that’s set up for that kind of speed and flexibility,” McGuire said.
WHO’S BEHIND IT
McGuire spent 15 years running Pressbooks, an open publishing platform used in higher education.
Co-founder and CTO Hadrien David was a founding engineer at Montreal health-tech firm Dialogue and helped take it from launch to IPO.
Retired Vice-Admiral Ron Lloyd, former Commander of the Royal Canadian Navy, is an adviser.
WHAT’S NEXT
The funding will grow the engineering team and pay for tools that flag which courses need updating when a manual or doctrine changes. Bloomsco is also targeting NATO and allied markets. McGuire said talks with other services and several defence primes are underway but not ready to announce.
BOTTOM LINE
“Our training systems were built in the military for Cold War,” McGuire said. “We need to rethink this.”
