Factory Floors and Holograms: Fredericton's Industrial-Tech Duo

Cybersecurity gets the headlines, but Fredericton has quietly developed a second specialty: software for heavy industry.

Kognitiv Spark

Kognitiv Spark builds RemoteSpark, a mixed-reality remote assistance platform. The idea: a technician wearing a HoloLens headset in the field connects to a remote expert who can see what they see and drop holographic instructions into their view. The company found early traction where the economics are most obvious — defence, energy, and industrial maintenance, where flying an expert to a site costs thousands and downtime costs more. Working with military and industrial customers also forced an unusual discipline for a startup: secure, low-bandwidth operation as a design constraint rather than an afterthought.

Eigen Innovations

Eigen Innovations attacks a different industrial pain point: quality inspection on production lines. Its platform combines machine vision — including thermal imaging — with process data so manufacturers can catch defects in-line instead of after the fact, and trace them back to process causes. Automotive and industrial-products plants are core territory.

Why this cluster makes sense here

Neither company is an accident of geography:

• UNB engineering supplies mechatronics and computer-vision talent.
• Regional industry — energy, forestry, defence contractors — provides reference customers who care about uptime, not hype.
• Modest local capital favours revenue-first business models, and industrial customers pay real money early.

Industrial tech will never be as legible as consumer software. But as a durable, defensible niche for a small province, it's hard to beat — and both companies have spent a decade proving it compounds.