Long before Dominion Dynamics closed its $139-million Series A round this summer, it faced a more basic financial problem.
The Ottawa-based startup was growing fast and quickly becoming a major player in Canadian defence technology. But its legacy bank was holding it back. Supplier transactions couldn’t be processed, and payments were delayed. For a company in hypergrowth, a single missed payment could stall manufacturing.
“Sovereignty is a huge part of our focus, and the fact that Venn is Canadian made it a very easy choice.”
Mitch Carkner, Dominion
“[It was] very siloed, difficult from an onboarding perspective. Payments and cards were a very difficult thing, and in 2026 they shouldn’t be,” said Mitch Carkner, Dominion’s Chief Operating Officer.
The final straw came when the bank de-platformed Dominion altogether, leaving the company in urgent need of a new financial provider.
That’s when a friend pointed Carkner to Venn, the Toronto-based FinTech that lets businesses move money, manage team spending, and sync transactions with their accounting software—all from one platform.
Carkner signed up and within an hour received a call from Venn co-founder and co-CEO Saud Aziz. He walked through the challenges Dominion had faced, and the company was onboarded that same day.
“We use Venn for payments and individual cards. On Mondays, our finance team gets together, we look at all our payments, check invoices, and then execute on the platform,” said Carkner.
Built for companies scaling fast
Dominion’s experience illustrates the problem Venn set out to solve. Its founders, Aziz and Ahmed Shafik, saw Canadian startups and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as being underserved by traditional banks.
For companies trying to scale quickly, new employees need to hit the ground running on day one, suppliers need to be paid on time, and finance teams need to be able to see where all the money is going. Handling those tasks across separate systems only adds to the workload as the business expands.
A simpler way to manage spending
For Carkner, Venn’s appeal is in its simplicity and the ease of its systems and automations. Dominion now pays suppliers on time and manages employee purchases through individual cards, earning one percent cashback on its spending. Both run through the same platform, replacing the separate systems that made its earlier setup difficult.
As Dominion adds suppliers, Venn offers ACH/EFT payments, wire transfers, and Interac e-transfers, alongside global transfers to more than 180 countries. Businesses can schedule recurring bills automatically, reducing the work of handling regular payments as their vendor lists expand.
And, as new people join the team, Dominion can issue them a virtual card through Venn right away, so they can buy what they need to get to work without waiting for a physical card. Managers set spending limits and decide which purchases need approval, while finance can see who’s spending what in real time.
Venn Intelligence, the platform’s built-in AI tools, reads uploaded receipts and matches them to transactions. It uses the company’s accounting history to suggest expense categories and proposes rules to automate recurring patterns. Finance teams can then review those suggestions and send categorized transactions and matched receipts to QuickBooks, reducing the manual data entry necessary. Venn says businesses using the tools save around 10 hours a month on accounting work.
Dominion has used Venn since pre-seed, through its $21-million seed round and recent $139-million Series A. Carkner expects the platform to continue supporting the company as its workforce and supplier network expands.
Sovereignty first
At Dominion, Carkner points to the simplicity of the platform and its automations as benefits for the team. The company manages supplier payments and individual employee cards together and earns one percent cashback on its spending.
They’ve used Venn since pre-seed, through a $21-million seed round and their $139-million Series A round in June. Carkner expects that relationship to continue as Dominion grows. Alongside those practical benefits, he said Venn’s Canadian roots sealed the deal when Dominion was looking for a new financial partner.
“Dominion is building a Canadian company for our military,” he said. “Sovereignty is a huge part of our focus, and the fact that Venn is Canadian made it a very easy choice for our capital and our payment solution.”
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Feature image courtesy Venn.
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