Building sports technology that powers olympians from the Yukon

What brought you to Whitehorse?

Alastair Smith moved with his wife from Toronto to Whitehorse, like many others looking for adventure. What started as a two-year trial never ended. In 2015, after exiting a marketing company he had founded, Alastair was searching for a new challenge. His passion for sports and technology ultimately led to the creation of Protern.

What’s the Protern story?

Protern began as a hardware solution designed to measure force and efficiency for cross-country skiers. The company successfully sold prototypes to seven national teams, including the Swiss and Norwegian teams. However, they received a piece of feedback that changed everything.

“The Norwegian teams basically told us: this is great data, but we don’t know how we’d actually use it,” Alastair recalls. “And if they didn’t know how to use it, nobody would.”

At the same time, the Swiss team was experimenting with adapting soccer tracking sensors for alpine skiing. That insight sparked a major pivot. Instead of focusing on niche cross-country metrics, Protern shifted into alpine skiing, developing GPS-based systems capable of measuring speed, positioning, and athlete performance throughout an entire course.

The timing was both fortunate and difficult. The platform officially launched during the 2019 winter season, just before COVID disrupted the sports world. Despite those headwinds, the technology gained traction because it offered something traditional timing systems couldn’t: detailed insight into how an athlete performed at every point on the hill, not just at timing splits. Today, Protern can even overlay performance metrics directly onto video footage for deeper analysis.

That innovation has propelled the company onto the global stage. Today, Protern systems are used by national teams, clubs, and performance programs across more than 30 countries. They are now one of the most widely adopted alpine ski analytics platforms in the world.

What are some of the advantages/challenges of operating a global business from Whitehorse?

Operating from Whitehorse hasn’t been a major barrier.

“Foreign customers don’t really care where in Canada we are,” Alastair says. “To them, we’re just Canadian.”

Fulfillment is managed through third-party logistics partners in Europe and the U.S., while the business itself remains highly software-driven. The company also embraces remote work, hiring specialized experts regardless of where they live.

In some ways, being based in the Yukon has even been an advantage. “There’s access to funding and support programs here that would’ve been much harder to access elsewhere,” he explains.

What’s your proudest/favourite moment in business?

One of Alastair’s proudest moments came when Protern crossed a major threshold:

“At first, every sale was founder-led, a grind. Then suddenly we started seeing people we’d never met wearing our gear and buying our products. That felt amazing.”

Why did you join Tech Yukon, how has our community served you?

Alastair has also been involved with Tech Yukon since the early 2000s and sees the organization as a key part of building a stronger northern innovation ecosystem.

“I want to see more companies here solving problems that are bigger than Yukon, bigger than Canada,” he says. “There’s no reason those companies can’t be built here.”

From a small Yukon startup to the slopes of the Olympics, Protern is proving that world-class technology can come from anywhere, even the North.