Act One: The Wrong Audience
Selin had spent two years presenting the magnetometer to the wrong people. Not wrong in the sense that they were uninterested — several investors had been interested — but wrong in the sense that investors were not the customers. The magnetometer was not a product in search of a market. It was a component in search of a program.
She knew this abstractly. She had attended CANSEC twice, walked the floor, collected business cards from prime contractors whose booths were staffed by business development people who took her one-pager and said they would be in touch. None had been in touch. She had submitted a response to one IDEaS challenge that was adjacent to her technology. The response had been acknowledged. The challenge had proceeded. She had not heard further.
The problem was not capability. The magnetometer worked. It was small enough to fit in a Group 2 UAS payload, sensitive enough to detect metallic anomalies at 150 metres AGL, and ruggedized to -40°C operating temperature. It was exactly the capability that sovereignty-sensitive surveillance requirements called for.
She had no mechanism to find the program that needed it before the program's teaming decisions were made.
Act Two: The Sovereignty Requirement
Marc's subcontract requirements document had a sovereignty flag on the sensor payload line. The program had a Five Eyes data-sharing architecture that precluded ITAR-controlled sensor technology from US suppliers — a restriction that eliminated every American firm on his preliminary supplier list and left him with one Canadian sensor company whose altitude rating fell short of the program envelope.
He had asked his business development contacts across the Canadian defence community. Three referrals had come back, all pointing at the same inadequate supplier. He had posted a capability request through PSPC's procurement portal three months ago. Two responses had arrived, both from firms without FSC clearance and without the environmental rating the program required.
He had forty-three days before teaming decisions were locked. After that, the proposal would go forward with a sensor capability gap noted as a program risk — a gap that would either be resolved by a waiver request to accept a non-sovereign sensor or by a schedule slip that nobody wanted.
He opened the platform on a Tuesday afternoon.
Act Three: The Forty-Three Days
The platform's capability matching had indexed Selin's profile against Marc's subcontract requirement the previous week — the match was high-confidence on sensor type, altitude rating, environmental specification, and sovereignty status. The platform had flagged it as a time-sensitive match: teaming window closing in under sixty days.
Marc's message arrived in Selin's platform inbox on that Tuesday evening. He attached the unclassified capability requirement summary. She read it in twenty minutes and understood, for the first time, exactly which program had been looking for her.
The technical call happened the following morning. Marc's program office issued a letter of intent for a development subcontract eleven days later.
The teaming decision was made with four days to spare.
Characters are fictional. PSPC's Industrial and Technological Benefits Policy, DND's IDEaS program, ITAR sovereignty restrictions on Canadian defence programs, and the subcontract teaming timeline dynamics are real. DeeperPoint is building the matching infrastructure this market requires.