Thomson Cayley

As a recent graduate with a Bachelor of Applied Science in Computer Engineering from Queen's University (April 2026), I am the co-founder of Dextra, where we are building a spatial AI platform that bridges the gap between design engineering and scalable manufacturing. We capture the tacit "know-how" that lives in the hands and decisions of skilled builders — the knowledge hardware SMEs lose every time an expert walks out the door — and translate it first into automated Standard Operating Procedures, and eventually into the instruction data that will power humanoid robots on the factory floor.

My technical foundations were built and proven during my 15-month tenure as a Data Scientist at Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED). There, I engineered the "Canadian Productivity Monitor" using R and Power BI to automate the ingestion of economic data. By replacing manual narrative synthesis with automated pipelines, I cut reporting turnaround times by over 90%. I also developed complex automation scripts using Python and R to process UN Comtrade data, and built a Python web scraper to provide real-time tracking of geopolitical indicators. This experience taught me how to transform raw, unstructured data into directed analysis that directly guides high-stakes decision-making.

The vision behind Dextra is grounded in hands-on research into capturing and interpreting human physical action. My senior capstone project — a custom deep learning architecture for "EIT Linkband," a low-cost wearable device for non-invasive hand position estimation — gave me an early technical foothold in exactly the problem Dextra now solves at scale: translating human motion and decision-making into machine-usable data. Competing in Major League Hacks' QHacks further sharpened my full-stack execution skills, where I built "Storybook ML" with a React Native frontend and a high-concurrency Python backend integrated with the OpenAI API.

I grew up in Ottawa and have always valued hard work and community. The grit I developed through tree planting and the problem-solving I honed while helping open a fast-paced restaurant remain core to how I operate as a founder.

At Dextra, we believe hardware innovators shouldn't have to choose between building great products and surviving the grind of scaling them. I am driven by designing systems that capture human expertise and compress the "valley of death" between prototype and production — first by freeing engineers from writing SOPs, and ultimately by making 24/7 robotic manufacturing accessible to companies that could never justify bespoke automation on their own.