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In the wee hours of the morning on November 22, 2025, a group of engineers gathered at the North Bay Airport to launch a stratospheric balloon. Several years in the making, this balloon launch was the first for the company and a major milestone on their journey.

Founded in 2021, Stratotegic’s technology combines both hardware and software in a low-cost, fully autonomous high-altitude balloon (HAB) to tackle critical challenges such as wildfire monitoring and surveillance of Arctic sovereignty.

“HABs have the unique opportunity to get very high – higher than drones or planes – while also maintaining persistency in that area whereas a satellite is just going to pass on by in a split second and only capture a moment in time,” says Stratotegic’s Co-Founder and CEO Graeme Daly. “Then you have to wait until that satellite passes over that area again, which can lead to large gaps in data collection.”

The more consistent positioning of a HAB allows the balloons to gather and relay data in real-time, over a set period of time in a specified area, thereby reducing the data gaps.

Daly further explains that the HABs can be launched at a fraction of the cost of a satellite launch, and are more sustainable by using helium rather than fossil fuels.

Queen’s academic expertise and strategic funding
Long before the November 2025 flight, Stratotegic’s journey began with the late Jeremy Henderson, a former helicopter pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force with 21 years of service. He knew that HABs could be used for communications or recording weather and other phenomena. To see this vision through, Henderson connected with Queen’s Partnerships and Innovation’s (QPI) acceleration and incubation programs, as well as the broader Kingston innovation ecosystem to access much needed resources.

“I was first introduced to Jeremy’s work through Mitacs,” says Queen’s Professor and Stratotegic’s Principal Investigator Martin Guay. Dr. Guay’s expertise is nonlinear and adaptive control systems design as well as the development of autonomous motion planning and altitude control strategies. “He was looking for interns to work on this idea, and I happened to already be working in the HAB research space.”

The first Mitacs project led to the development of an adaptive autonomous control system for which a US patent application was drafted and filed with the assistance of QPI’s Patent Agent and Director, Intellectual Property, Dr. Stephen Scribner in November 2022. A year later, an international (PCT) patent application was filed. Currently there are pending Canadian and US applications derived from the PCT application.

“One of my PhD students working on the project had come up with this strategy to float balloons autonomously using some control algorithm and they were able to demonstrate that this could work not just for balloons, but any kind of unmanned autonomous vehicle (UAV),” says Guay of the patent application.

During the pandemic, Guay and Henderson also collaborated to win a research grant application to further the technology.

Preparing for the first flight
In late summer 2025, Stratotegic applied to and was awarded a microgrant from the Scale Up Platform Project. “The biggest use of the microgrant funds was the license for the hardware bench that we already had, which essentially allowed us to rehearse full flight simulations,” says Daly. “We were able to practice all of our procedures, debug our software and make a lot of changes based on these rehearsals.”

Those simulated rehearsals paid off for the first official launch by Stratotegic in the fall.

“The mission of our first launch was to test avionics, verify that our control software was accurate and validate the models that we had tested in the lab,” says Daly, who considers the maiden flight a success. “We were able to verify that everything worked the way it was supposed to, including the fail safe mechanism we had set up.”

Beyond the launch
Stratotegic’s staff now has their work cut out for them in analyzing all of the data gathered from the flight. “A lot of data is going to model validation as well as validating our wind prediction algorithms,” says Daly, who hopes to publish results in early 2026.

“Right now the PhD students working with Stratotegic are really focused on developing the more advanced motion planning and control platform,” adds Guay.

The company is looking to use the information gathered for another launch in March 2026 and, as a longer term vision, they have their sights set on fleets of balloons working autonomously together for more robust wildfire monitoring and Arctic surveillance.

“People tend to think that satellites are the only way, or drones are the only way to solve these particular problems but we have another complementary option that is backed by Queen’s University’s research and expertise. And we now have field data to show the feasibility of it,” says Daly. “So looking ahead, we’re focused on making the platform better and looking to connect with the right networks who want to use our technology to address national and global challenges.”

For more information about the Scale Up Platform program and available resources from QPI such as our patent services, contact qpi.info@queensu.ca.