For most of his career, Marius Draghia was solving a very unsexy problem: the messy tangle of wires inside electronic systems.

While working on a telecom optical spectrometer project, he stumbled onto a way to eliminate connectors entirely, replacing bulky wiring harnesses with a single flat, adhesive data line he calls "RadioWires."

The name is a bit of a misnomer: there is no wireless signal involved. Instead, the technology channels radio-frequency-style transmission through a shielded, tape-like conductor that can be applied directly to a machine's frame, like a very smart piece of duct tape.

Draghia spent years chasing automotive applications before mentors at the Creative Destruction Lab in Vancouver pushed him toward faster-moving markets. Ukraine changed his thinking on defence entirely. Now his Ottawa-based startup, RadioWires, is angling for a spot in Canada's defence supply chain, betting that an industry desperate to scale drone and robotics production cannot keep building wiring harnesses by hand.

Vanguard’s Steve Ladurantaye spoke with Draghia about his path from the lab bench to the battlefield.

Your background is pure engineering, not entrepreneurship. How did RadioWires go from a lab problem to a company?

I was building electronics based on the PC/104 stack system and got frustrated with how connector-heavy it was. Once I found a way to eliminate the connectors, I got a little scared, honestly, thinking about what it meant. I went straight to the patent office before I told almost anyone. Only after that did I start pitching to co-founders and mentors. I have thirty years of engineering experience, but I only really started opening my mouth about this once the idea had a name.

You said a year or two ago you had no appetite for defence work. What changed?

Ukraine. Watching that unfold over the last four or five years was a wake-up call. I used to think a war like that could not happen, that no one could argue for it. That turned my thinking upside down. Then last December, the ventureLAB incubator challenged its startups to look at dual-use applications, and that is when we really understood the shift happening in Canadian geopolitics, especially around the Arctic.

How does a startup with zero defence connections actually break in?

Slowly. We started talking to Anduril in the United States and Dominion Dynamics here in Canada. Mentors helped us shape a pitch called "Drone Takes a Bullet," built around the idea that our wiring is redundant by design, so it survives damage that would kill a conventional harness. We also applied to a defence-specific stream at the Creative Destruction Lab after watching an Estonian startup pitch in a completely different register than everyone else in the room. That application is still working its way through, with stops planned in Estonia, Germany and Toronto.

Walk us through what the technology actually replaces.

Picture a machine with hundreds of individual wires running to sensors, actuators and compute nodes. Every one of those wires can interfere with the others, and the more you add, the worse the electromagnetic noise gets. We replace that entire mess with a single multi-tap transmission line: one flat copper conductor, applied like tape, that reaches every node in the system. It bends more easily than round wire, resists cracking longer, and borrows structural strength from the machine's own frame instead of being bolted or wire-tied on.

Why does that matter specifically for defence?

Scale. If Ukraine has taught the world anything, it is that everyone can design a drone, but almost no one can print thousands of them a week using a wiring harness built by hand. Our approach turns wiring into something closer to manufacturing: a few machines and minimal labour can produce as much network as you need, which matters enormously when you need to surge production fast.

What is next for Radio Wire?

We are opening a seed round now. We started by integrating just the transceivers onto the tape, but pilot work with a Toronto robotics company showed us we could bring far more electronics, like camera systems, onto the same platform. The long-term goal is to collapse an entire machine's wiring harness and its electronics into one continuous flexible system.

This interview has been condensed and edited.