Nacreous UAV: Developing Canadian-built Arctic operations drone

As Canada looks to strengthen its presence in the Arctic, monitoring the country’s vast northern territory remains a significant challenge.

Nacreous UAV, an aerospace startup founded by a team with roots in the University of Calgary’s Schulich School of Engineering, is developing an Arctic-capable drone designed to help address that capability gap.

Led by CEO Haziq Sabri, BSc (Eng)’25; COO and founding software engineer Liam Mah, BSc (Eng)’26; and CTO and founding electrical engineer Rostom Halouane, a current electrical and electronics engineering student, the company received $15,000 from the Cenovus UCeed Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Accelerator to support continued aircraft development.

For the founders, the project is about more than building a new type of drone: it’s about giving Canada greater capacity to protect its sovereignty.

Meeting a northern need

For organizations like the Canadian Coast Guard, monitoring the Arctic often requires covering vast distances in remote and challenging environments. Not only is that expensive, but it can also put pilots at risk when flying in extreme weather conditions.

To address these challenges, the Nacreous team reached out to the Coast Guard, connecting with personnel involved in surveillance and reconnaissance for the agency. Those conversations helped shape the drone's design around real-world operational needs.

The result is a drone that combines the capabilities of a multirotor aircraft with those of a fixed-wing airplane into a single unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).

“They literally gave us a wish list for their ideal aircraft,” says Sabri. “And that’s what the aircraft is built off of.”

The drone is designed to be modular, allowing it to carry different sensors depending on the mission, including cameras, thermal-imaging systems, radar and mapping equipment.

Mah describes the UAV as a “Swiss Army-knife aircraft” capable of supporting ice and wildlife monitoring, search and rescue, mapping, and detecting illegal fishing or dumping.

Built for the Arctic

Many drones can take off vertically. Others can fly long distances efficiently. Few are designed to do both while also operating in Arctic conditions.

The UAV can take off and land vertically from locations where runways are unavailable, such as from a ship at sea, before transitioning into fixed-wing flight for greater range and aerodynamic efficiency.

"Generally speaking, the Arctic is going to inherently punish anything that's not robust by design," says Mah.

Cold temperatures can cause icing that reduces flight and battery performance, while fog, high winds, and a lack of roads and runways create additional challenges for traditional aircraft operations.

Nacreous’ goal is to develop an all-in-one UAV designed for use in the Arctic. “A lot of the drones that are on the market right now are foreign-made and they're not built for the Canadian conditions,” says Mah.

The founders see this as an opportunity to build aircraft for a market they believe is underserved by existing autonomous solutions.

From Schulich UAV to startup

Nacreous was born out of UCalgary’s Schulich UAV student design team, where the founders first met in 2021 while designing and building autonomous aircraft.

“We really bonded over our love of aviation and love of innovation at Schulich UAV,” says Sabri.

Over several years building drones, the team won numerous awards, including placing first out of 81 international teams for technical design at the 2025 Student Unmanned Aerial Systems Competition (SUAS) with their drone, Orca.

The experience gave the founders the technical skills to design aircraft, innovate and lead teams, while also bringing them together as friends.

“We really thought that there has to be a way for us to keep working on this,” says Sabri. “And then we had the thought of: What if we just started developing solutions for the industry?”

That idea eventually led the three to the Canadian Arctic, where they saw an opportunity to apply their experience to a gap in monitoring the region.

Building Canadian capability

The support from the Cenovus UCeed Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Accelerator is already helping Nacreous continue developing its aircraft, including a gimbal to safely evaluate the aircraft’s flight systems before flight testing.

“Having any way of being able to validate if your flight systems are going to work without having to put the aircraft in the air is unbelievably valuable,” says Sabri.

Looking ahead, Sabri, Mah and Halouane hope to develop more of the aircraft and its supply chain within Canada, reducing reliance on foreign suppliers while building technology tailored to northern operating conditions.

“Being able to design and build something this capable entirely in Canada, without relying on foreign supply chains, genuinely matters,” says Halouane.

As Nacreous looks to the future, the three friends see the aircraft as part of a new generation of Canadian-built technology helping Canada defend its Arctic sovereignty, with the company aiming to operate in the Arctic by 2029.