Lastwall Closes $16M as NBIF Writes the Biggest Cheque in Its History

Fredericton's cybersecurity bench just added a heavyweight funding line. Lastwall, the identity-security company headquartered in the capital, has closed a $16-million round led by BDC Capital's StrongNorth Fund — one of the new defence-and-security fund's first investments, and its first in cybersecurity.

The round drew the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, Frostbite Capital, and existing backers Blue Bear Capital, BlueWing Ventures, and 18West. The detail that matters most locally: per the announcement, NBIF made the largest single investment in its history to be part of it.

"New Brunswick has built a strong advantage in cybersecurity, and NBIF is proud to back companies like Lastwall that are turning that strength into global opportunity," NBIF CEO Jeff White said in the release.

Proven in the hardest market first

Lastwall sells identity-first security — Zero Trust authentication that works across cloud, hybrid, and disconnected environments, with quantum-resilient cryptography built in for the day current encryption stops being enough. Its flagship IDCommand software, as BetaKit reported, assesses more than 200 characteristics of every login attempt — keystroke cadence, mouse movement, hardware configuration — and escalates authentication when something looks wrong.

The company did the hard validation before raising: it has worked with the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Innovation Unit since 2017, holds FedRAMP Moderate Authorization — clearing it to sell across the U.S. federal ecosystem — and counts the Government of Canada as a customer.

"We proved our model in the world's most demanding federal market," founder and CEO Karl Holmqvist said in the announcement. "We earned FedRAMP Moderate Authorization, secured U.S. government systems, and built a platform for the realities of modern cyber warfare."

Bringing it home

The BetaKit framing describes the raise as a Series A extension, and the stated plan is expansion at home: protecting Canadian government networks and critical infrastructure — the water, power, and food-supply systems Holmqvist told BetaKit are now routine targets for nation-state attackers. As part of the deal, Peter Dawe, BDC's vice-president of defence strategy and a recently retired Canadian Armed Forces Major-General, joins Lastwall's board.

That positioning lands squarely on Canada's current preoccupation with sovereign defence capability — a procurement wave New Brunswick companies like Kognitiv Spark have also been building toward.

Another proof point for the cluster

Fredericton's security lineage runs from Q1 Labs through the QRadar era and its alumni to current firms like Sonrai Security and TrojAI. A $16-million round — in a province where venture totals for a whole year have recently hung around the low tens of millions — is a meaningful single data point, and NBIF putting its largest-ever cheque into a cybersecurity company says where the province thinks its edge is.

Lastwall runs its headquarters in Fredericton with a U.S. office in Honolulu. The next milestones to watch are procurement ones: the company says a DoD Impact Level 4 authorization is in progress, and the Canadian expansion this round funds will show up — if it works — in exactly the kind of government contracts that rarely make press releases.

Sources

• Lastwall Raises $16M to Bring U.S.-Proven Cyber Defense Platform Home — official release via Newswire (amount, investors, NBIF largest-ever investment, quotes, FedRAMP, board addition)
• Lastwall raises $16 million to defend critical infrastructure in cyberspace — BetaKit (Series A extension framing, IDCommand 200+ login signals, nation-state infrastructure threats)
• Lastwall company announcement — company post (product platform, DoD history, Honolulu office, IL4 in progress)
• BDC release — StrongNorth Fund's first cybersecurity investment; Peter Dawe board seat