Listen in on stories about companies navigating the unique challenges and opportunities necessary to achieve success. Ottawa is home to some of the country’s fastest-growing companies that have managed to grow through some of the most challenging years to date.
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S15 E8
Sem Ponnambalam, Co-Founder and CEO of xahive. Jan 8th, 2026 | 22 minutes |
Reba Molotsi is a business development strategist with a passion for strengthening Canada’s defence industrial base and driving meaningful collaboration within the defence industry.
Reba began her career in foreign direct investment, supporting projects that attracted U.S. companies to establish operations in Ottawa. Her early experience in economic development sparked an interest in how international partnerships and investment shape national capability and competitiveness.
Today, she brings that same lens to her work in the defence sector, helping companies navigate business retention and expansion (BRE) strategies, identify growth opportunities, and align innovative solutions with Canada’s defence priorities.
Driven by a deep interest in industrial participation and innovation adoption, Reba focuses on how Canada can better leverage emerging technologies and homegrown capabilities to meet the evolving needs of the Canadian Armed Forces and its allies.
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S15 E8 Xahive Cybersecurity January 8th, 2026 | 22 minutes |
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S15 E7 Anvil Intelligence December 4, 2025 | 25 minutes |
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S15 E6 H2 Analytics Inc November 27, 2025 | 32 minutes |
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S15 E5 TACTIQL November 20, 2025 | 40 minutes |
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S15 E4 Dominion Dynamics November 13, 2025 | 17 minutes |
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S15 E3 Quantropi November 6, 2025 | 24 minutes |
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S15 E2 ONE9 October 29, 2025 | 22 minutes |
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S15 E1 RANOVUS October 27, 2025 | 34 minutes |
Since launching in 2020, Invested in Our New Reality has benefited from outstanding hosts and guest hosts. Season by season, the podcast hosts have individually enhanced the overall quality and depth of the podcast’s content by bringing fresh perspectives and expertise to each season and by offering diverse insights and knowledge on various topics. Invested in our New Reality hosts and guest hosts have included:
Invested in Our New Reality is a dynamic podcast where business leaders offer honest observations about navigating our ever-evolving reality. Each episode provides a space for entrepreneurs to speak candidly about the challenges and opportunities they’ve faced, arming listeners with practical advice on how to thrive in the future.
Season 15 of Invested in Our New Reality
Ottawa is a globally recognized, innovative, and future-ready city and the best place to learn, work, live, and play. A vibrant city can provide access to a diverse and highly educated pool of tech talent, world-class R&D, low business costs, innovation ecosystems, larger markets, and an exceptional quality of life, all of which significantly impact the success and growth of loyal entrepreneurs and companies.
In Season 15 of Invested in Our New Reality: Defence Innovation you’ll hear directly from the innovators, founders, and leaders shaping Canada’s future. This season explores how collaborative innovation in the Ottawa-Gatineau region is strengthening sovereignty and contributing to our readiness here and abroad.
Funded in part by the Federal Economic Development Agency of Southern Ontario.
Embedded software in high demand with Crank Software:
Crank Software helps easily develop and embed UI designs. With over 350 clients from startups to Fortune 500 companies, Crank Software has helped launch 500 million UIs. A day in the life of a Software Developer at Crank Software includes becoming an expert on its award-winning platform, Storyboard, and developing interface layers from UI to backend code. Taking home an award as one of Ottawa’s best places to work at the 2018-2019 Employee’s Choice Awards, a career at Crank Software is sure to be fun and rewarding.
DevOps are in high demand with these companies:
Evidence Partners is changing the way researchers work. Its systematic literature review system, DistillerSR, helps deliver reviews up to 60% faster than spreadsheet-based processes. The SaaS company is exploding with growth, outgrowing its last office in just four months and taking home a Best Ottawa Business (BOB) award in 2019. This growth is driving Evidence Partners to look for Fullstack Developers and DevOps Engineers that are passionate about streamlining research in the academic and medical fields. Full benefits from day one and flexible work options are just a few of the perks you get working at Evidence Partners.
K
ivuto helps schools go digital. Kivuto Cloud streamlines the management of educational resources such as e–texts and license keys, saving 20K+ schools an average of $50K. Kivuto partnered with educational giant Pearson in 2019 to bring digital education resources to academic institutions. A passion for education paired with skills in .NET Core Web API, AWS, Azure, React, SQL, and other tools and technologies make Kivuto a great place to grow your DevOps or Fullstack Engineering career.
Rewind Backups provides automated backup services, so businesses don’t lose their hard work. The development team at Rewind is made up of four teams of two to three people. Developers implement, test, document, and maintain back-end systems for high-traffic back-up services, delivering quality code and improving the development and deployment processes using AWS. A day at Rewind on the development team could look like anything from supporting Shopify’s new bulk APIs to creating Rewind-Connect; a wrapper for AWS SSM for connecting to Rewind staging and production systems. As the winner of the Ottawa Business Journal’s Employee Choice Award two years in a row, Rewind is an ideal place to work and grow.
Recently securing $10M in financing, Tehama is on the cutting edge of developing tools for the remote workforce. Tehama’s service delivery platform enables organizations to easily onboard, manage and scale a distributed workforce in a secure way. 150 companies are using Tehama. 600,000+ hours of IT services delivered. Zero breaches. Under the leadership of VP Engineering, Jacopo Toccacieli, you’ll be working as part of Tehama’s agile development team and immersed in developing new features for its cloud-based solutions. This will include helping define company-wide API standards, working in React and Angular, and having the ability to work with SQL. You’ll have the option to work remotely or at Tehama’s beautiful offices in the heart of Westboro, steps from some of the best shopping, coffee shops and restaurants in Ottawa.
Mobile developers are in high demand with these companies:
Field Effect monitors cyber threats. Amongst many organizations who trust Field Effort to safeguard their cybersecurity, Canadian Internet Registration Agency (CIRA) teamed up with this scaling Ottawa firm to deploy its new API. Talents with an agile and test-driven approach as well as skills in C/C++, Objective-C, and Java are invaluable in helping build and improve Field Effect’s key security products: Covalence, Cyber Range, and Noble. As one of the top Ottawa employers who scored the highest in the Employee Net Promotor Score Initiative commissioned by Invest Ottawa’s Scale-Up program, Field Effect is appreciated by its employees for its commitments to transparency, trust and openness.
Foko Retail helps retail stores manage tasks. Used by 60+ of the largest names in retail including Nike and Dyson, Foko Retail’s mobile-based task management software is easy to use from operations to visual merchandising. With a growing user base, Foko Retail is looking for mobile developers that are adaptable and passionate about retail and SaaS. While Foko Retail’s culture can be relaxed with office dogs and casual attire, it means business when it comes to its team, customers, and products. A competitive salary and benefits package doesn’t hurt either.
Shoebox enables hearing care around the world. It creates, sells, and supports products that help clinicians identify hearing loss. The maker of Shoebox, Clearwater Clinical, hit a huge milestone in 2018 when they entered a strategic partnership with international hearing device company Sivantos. Shoebox lives by the work hard play hard ethos, and offers an array of benefits, team sports, bean bag chairs, and video games at their Glebe Annex office. If you want to be part of a team that does well by doing good, Shoebox is looking for developers with first-hand experience in AWS hosted solutions.
Full stack developers are in high demand with these companies:
BitHeads builds custom software solutions. With an impressive roster of over 500 projects delivered to Fortune 1000 companies, a career with BitHeads is dynamic with so much room to learn and grow. You could be working on projects ranging from designing an interface for a leading forensic ballistics company to building support for a mobile game with 10 million active users— it’s truly different every day. Whether you are a full stack, server-side, or front-end developer, or prefer to validate developed software, BitHeads is in constant need of skilled resources to build games, apps, and backend support.
Field Effect monitors cyber threats. Amongst many organizations who trust Field Effort to safeguard their cybersecurity, Canadian Internet Registration Agency (CIRA) teamed up with this scaling Ottawa firm to deploy its new API. Talents with an agile and test-driven approach as well as skills in C/C++, Objective-C, and Java are invaluable in helping build and improve Field Effect’s key security products: Covalence, Cyber Range, and Noble. As one of the top Ottawa employers who scored the highest in the Employee Net Promotor Score Initiative commissioned by Invest Ottawa’s Scale-Up program, Field Effect is appreciated by its employees for its commitments to transparency, trust and openness.
Rewind Backups provides automated backup services, so businesses don’t lose their hard work. The development team at Rewind is made up of four teams of two to three people. Developers implement, test, document, and maintain back-end systems for high-traffic back-up services, delivering quality code and improving the development and deployment processes using AWS. A day at Rewind on the development team could look like anything from supporting Shopify’s new bulk APIs to creating Rewind-Connect; a wrapper for AWS SSM for connecting to Rewind staging and production systems. As the winner of the Ottawa Business Journal’s Employee Choice Award two years in a row, Rewind is an ideal place to work and grow.
Recently securing $10M in financing, Tehama is on the cutting edge of developing tools for the remote workforce. Tehama’s service delivery platform enables organizations to easily onboard, manage and scale a distributed workforce in a secure way. 150 companies are using Tehama. 600,000+ hours of IT services delivered. Zero breaches. Under the leadership of VP Engineering, Jacopo Toccacieli, you’ll be working as part of Tehama’s agile development team and immersed in developing new features for its cloud–based solutions. This will include helping define company-wide API standards, working in React and Angular, and having the ability to work with SQL. You’ll have the option to work remotely or at Tehama’s beautiful offices in the heart of Westboro, steps from some of the best shopping, coffee shops and restaurants in Ottawa.
Data scientists utilize their analytical, statistical, and programming skills to collect, analyze, and interpret large data sets. They then use this information to develop data-driven solutions to difficult business challenges. Data scientists commonly have a bachelor’s degree in statistics, math, computer science, or economics. Data scientists have a wide range of technical competencies including: statistics and machine learning, coding languages, databases, machine learning, and reporting technologies.
Companies currently hiring data scientists
Transforming our data-driven world takes talent, and MindBridge is where it’s happening. This is where you’ll take artificial intelligence to enable and inspire humans to do more and be better. Our people, our customers, and our investors agree: No one else is accomplishing what we’re doing with data-driven AI right now. Learn more and Apply.
On the most basic level, software engineers write, debug, maintain, and test software that instructs a computer to accomplish certain tasks, such as saving information, performing calculations, etc. A software engineer will convert what needs to happen into one of many programming languages, the most common of which being Java, C++ and Python.
While many are self taught, most software engineers have obtained an undergraduate or graduate degree in computer science or computer engineering. The career of a software engineer typically follows one of two primary paths: they either progress through greater responsibility and ownership over technical architecture and systems or they progress into managing teams of software engineers and help orchestrate larger projects and help develop and mentor more junior engineers.
Companies currently hiring front-end developers
Tehama is enabling the digital workplace of the future. 150 companies are using Tehama. 600,000+ hours of IT services delivered. Zero breaches. The company’s head office is in the heart of the highly desirable Westboro neighborhood of Ottawa where you have your pick of the best of Ottawa’s cafes, restaurants and shops. Prefer to work from home? Tehama offers remote working options and flexible core hours. Join a team of the best and brightest and enjoy competitive salaries, benefits and a commitment to YOUR long-term success. Learn more and Apply.
Spartan Bioscience aspires to unleash the power of DNA testing for everyone. Like the Spartan warriors of Ancient Greece, our smart, hard-working, and honorable team members get things done. Learn 10 reasons for joining Spartan and apply today.