Jonathan Brun's Nimonik plants its flag in France while taking on private equity-backed giants
When Jonathan Brun launched Nimonik out of Montreal in 2008, he had $20,000, an engineering background from the gold mines of Timmins, Ontario, and a straightforward idea: give companies better tools to track the occupational health and safety regulations that apply to them. Nearly two decades later, that same independence-first philosophy is driving the Canadian compliance software company into Europe.
Nimonik recently opened an office in France, its first European outpost, to serve both European companies and international businesses, including Canadian ones, with operations on the continent. The move marks the next chapter in a slow-burn growth story that now includes 55 employees, approximately 900 client organizations, offices in Montreal, Oakland, California and Shanghai, and five acquisitions along the way.
"Building an international company that can compete internationally takes decades," Brun said. "You hear a lot about these overnight successes, but I firmly believe that's the case in most industries."
The underdog position
What makes the European push notable is not just the geography. It's who Nimonik is going up against. Brun is candid about the competitive landscape: pretty much all of the company's rivals in the compliance software space are now backed by private equity.
"We're competing against companies that just have much deeper financial pockets," he said.
That financial asymmetry, however, is something Brun has turned into a selling point. Nimonik is owned and operated by engineers and safety professionals, not financial institutions, and Brun argues that shapes everything from product development to customer service to pricing. Where private equity-backed competitors typically operate on a four-to-six-year exit timeline, Nimonik is playing a 30-year game.
"It allows us to make decisions that maybe don't pay off in the short term, but in the long term do provide a lot of dividends in terms of brand, maintaining our integrity, keeping prices affordable, and really trying to delight our customers at all times," Brun said.
In Europe, Nimonik is also leaning into its Canadian identity. Most of its competitors are American, and Brun says that gap is opening doors.
"When we go to Europe we can tell them, hey, we're not American, we're Canadian. That gives us a bit of goodwill."
Safety lived from the inside
Brun is a metallurgical engineer by training who spent time working in steel mills and underground at the Porcupine gold mine in Timmins before founding Nimonik. He's quick to say he doesn't hold formal safety credentials, but the company's culture reflects that ground-level experience. Many of the team members came up through consulting firms or worked directly on industrial sites before joining a software company.
That matters, Brun says, because a lot of the people who end up using Nimonik's platform aren't career safety professionals. Safety is often added onto someone's job description as an extra responsibility, particularly at smaller sites.
"A lot of our customers end up coming to us knowing they have a problem, knowing they have a challenge," he said. "They require not just a tool, they require support, education and training to help them implement the actual requirements and then get buy-in from the rest of the organization."
That understanding of how occupational health and safety compliance works on the ground shapes how Nimonik delivers its service. The platform covers not just federal and provincial OHS regulations across Canada but also engineering standards such as Canadian Standards Association (CSA) guidelines and B11 machinery safety standards. The goal is to give clients a single place to track, annotate and document their compliance status across all the regulations that apply to them.
Building toward global reach
Nimonik's European office was established organically, not through an acquisition, after Brun set a goal five years ago to build out both U.S. and European operations. The American expansion came through acquisition. Europe was different: no suitable target presented itself, so the company opened the France office on its own terms.
The immediate goal is straightforward: get the European operation to a point where it finances itself. The longer-term ambition is for Nimonik to function as a truly global company capable of supporting businesses managing safety compliance across multiple jurisdictions, including Canadian companies expanding overseas and European firms entering the Canadian market.
The company's sweet spot is mid-sized organizations, those with somewhere between 500 and 30,000 employees, particularly in heavy industry sectors: oil and gas, mining, sophisticated manufacturing and medical devices. Clients range from Air Canada to Glencore.
Brun also pointed to a broader reason the work matters, one that safety professionals will recognize immediately. Most workplace incidents, he noted, trace back to a failure to comply with an existing law, regulation or standard.
"If companies respected existing laws and regulations, never mind new ones, there'd be a lot less workplace incidents, workplace injuries," he said. "We're really out there trying to help keep people safe on the job site, and there's a lot of work still to be done there, even in 2026."
For a company built from $20,000 and 18 years of steady growth, the next chapter is just beginning. Nimonik's push into France reflects a model that Canadian safety companies can build internationally without selling out to the highest bidder.
