Defence has long been the domain of primes.
The war in Ukraine has changed that by introducing the tech sector to defence. The battlefield is now about drones, autonomy, cheap attritable hardware instead of expensive, exquisite systems. It is about speed, price, and efficiency; about the cost per kill and how we increase lethality with limited defence budgets.
Any question about whether this is unique to Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine is being answered firmly in the Middle East, where cheap Iranian Shaheds are being shot down by expensive missiles and fighter jets. Western militaries are now turning to Ukraine for help, and the cost of sustained warfare is a focus that again points back to the need for cheap and rapidly iterated tech sector hardware over traditional platforms, which often take years and cost a fortune to bring into service.
Startups are proving to be more agile when it comes to addressing these new challenges, and their velocity is attracting both talent and investment to the sector. Startups are becoming scale-ups, and scale-ups are becoming companies valued in the billions of Euros. We have already seen exits and acquisitions at the end of that cycle.
Resilience Media tracks this ecosystem daily. We are at the heart of the discussions, watching the new funds as they are raised, and the new startups as they are founded and scaled. To help make sense of this rapidly growing space, we’ve created our list of 100 leading companies in defence tech. We say ‘companies’ because many of these startups are growing so fast that they are already evolving out of the scale-up phase into neo-primes and significant businesses. But we are calling the list 100 Startups, because startups are as much about attitude, speed, and risk as they are about size and valuation.
There are now thousands of defence and resilience startups, collectively raising many billions of Euros annually. This is not a comprehensive list; it is a curated list.
Methodology
Over the last two years we have written about these startups, hosted them on the Resilience Conference stage, and spent many hours behind the scenes with their founders and investors. We have also been polling our network extensively over the last few months to ask who they think matters. And our team has carried out independent research, including incorporating data from PitchBook, LinkedIn, Dealroom, Crunchbase, and other analytics firms.
Our hope is that this list is useful to inform the ecosystem, and in particular to help people new to defence to understand what this rapidly growing sector looks like.
If you have feedback, please get in touch. And now, we present the 100 Startups to Watch in 2026.
