2025 in Review: Proof Points

A KTM at CES, an AI security agent, a new student cohort, and a province learning to stop counting startups — the NB tech year, story by story.

If 2024 was the year New Brunswick tech got practical, 2025 was the year the practicality produced receipts. The stories that defined it:

January: a Fredericton brain on an Austrian motorcycle

Potential Motors opened the year at CES with the world's first terrain-intelligence-equipped motorcycle, built through a year-long KTM partnership. Whatever comes next for the company, "global OEM ships prototype on NB software" entered the province's permanent highlight reel.

The security cluster's outcome era

Sonrai Security spent the year converting last year's Cloud Permissions Firewall launch into a platform: October brought WALLy, an AI agent that fixes privilege risk autonomously — including the privileges of other AI agents. December brought independent validation, with testing that showed the firewall blocking real AWS privilege-escalation attack paths. Beauceron kept compounding its human-risk franchise from Fredericton.

The pipeline refused to slow

UNB's Fraser Student Venture Fund backed a 2025 cohort spanning spatial tech, fintech, and diagnostics, while earlier vintages kept maturing — Picketa deepened its U.S. presence, and TME alumni continued to populate the province's cap tables.

The year's big question

We spent August on the region's most uncomfortable debate: whether Atlantic Canada has passed "peak startup." Our answer stands: formation counts peaked; the companies didn't. This year's evidence — CES stages, category-defining security products, industrial deals in factories most people can't name — supports the reframe.

Watching in 2026

The missing middle remains missing: NB still lacks the $5–15M growth rounds its best companies have earned. And the AI-agent economy that Sonrai is securing will reshape every company we cover, including the small ones. See you in January.

Sources

Primary documents for the year's biggest claims live on the linked stories above. Key originals: