Q&A with Daly Brown, Metropolitan’s Co-Founder and CEO
What’s your company’s origin story? What brought your team together?
Both myself and my co-founder have a background in aerospace and defence, where we worked for many years building mission-critical applications for airborne platforms. We left that industry and founded Metropolitan Technologies to build reliable and secure commercial products based on our experience.
Our first idea was to build smart city products with a focus on equity and privacy. After searching for a software platform to build on, we didn’t find one that met our standards for security, privacy, and reliability, so we decided to build our own.
It became apparent to us that the market opportunities for our platform were greater, so we pivoted to concentrate on building the platform and expand beyond cities to the broader critical infrastructure/industrial security market.
Given that cybersecurity risk is global, where do Canadian companies fit in? What can we do better than anyone else?
Canada has a rich ecosystem around research partnerships, public funding, and capital efficiency. These are important ingredients for deep tech companies building next generation technologies as it makes R&D affordable.
Cybersecurity is a complicated topic and requires sophisticated solutions. Canada can be at the vanguard of the next generation of cybersecurity technologies protecting our critical infrastructure.
What’s the best question you’ve ever been asked about what you do?
The best question we’ve been asked about our startup is “why now?”
The critical infrastructure market is very risk-averse, and penetrating the market has been historically difficult. Many infrastructure operators have existing systems they’ve relied upon for decades, and have been reluctant to adopt newer technologies. However, the digital transformation of industry is reaching a tipping point: operators are acknowledging the benefits of increasing connectivity within their infrastructure.
There are two key statistics that really hammer this point home:
- In 2024, there was a 146% rise in cyberattacks causing physical impairment to operations, according to Waterfall Security’s OT Cyber Threat Report.
- The median recovery costs for two critical infrastructure sectors, energy and water, quadrupled to US$3M in one year, according to a 2024 Sophos survey.
Our vision is to be the secure digital backbone of the world’s critical infrastructure, and an enabler of the digital transformation of industry. We believe our experience in aerospace and defence, and our secure by design and default approach to building technology, best positions us to capture this market, defend our infrastructure, and meet this moment.
What changes have you seen in Canadians’ awareness of cybersecurity in the past five years?
Cyberattacks on operational technology (OT) were virtually unknown until five years ago, but their volume has been doubling since 2009. This threat is distinct from information technology (IT) vulnerabilities, which cybersecurity measures regularly address.
Critical infrastructure, and the operational technology essential to its functioning, are high-value targets because attacks on them can cause threat to life and/or other high-cost effects.
Canadians are becoming aware of this threat, and are demanding action by our elected officials to both invest in, and deploy, sovereign capabilities to defend our infrastructure.
What excites you about the work being done in cyber in Canada right now?
There are tools and techniques to rigorously prove certain safety and security properties of a software system, but they’re underutilized in existing cybersecurity solutions.
These tools and techniques — called formal methods — have been used primarily in academic circles, and in limited instances in industry. However, they are some of the best methods we have to eliminate entire classes of vulnerabilities from software systems.
Customers should be looking for solutions that were built with formal methods to assure them of the reliability and security of the solutions they are buying. A quick Google search will show examples of how formal methods are being adopted by some of the giants in computing including Amazon, Google, NVIDIA, Anduril… and of course Metropolitan Technologies here in Canada.
Where and how do you want to see your product or service make an impact in the next five years?
Our mission is to build public trust and demonstrate that society can benefit from smart technology solutions without the associated dangers, and to raise the collective bar of security and privacy of critical infrastructure in Canada. Our platform ensures the responsible use of sensing and surveillance technologies, balancing security and efficiency with privacy and human rights.
