Resilience Media is supporting an important piece of research into this sector: the Working with Defence and Security 2024 survey. This is gathering the views of defence and dual-use founders in an anonymised study over the next four weeks to help create data to map the defence and security startup ecosystem.
The outbreak of war in Ukraine triggered a new wave of defence startups and dual-use business models, attracting new investors to the sector for the first time. While there is deal data to evidence this at a macro level, the market dynamics and tech trends are obscured because the numbers are largely merged into a single ‘defence and aerospace’ category.
Compounding this has been a lack of clarity around the concept of dual-use technologies. In general, this is understood to be technologies that can serve both commercial markets and defence and security customers. However, the concept of dual-use has not been clearly defined and it is not clear how many real dual-use startups there are. It is also not clear what range of relationships there are between these startups and government agencies.
This lack of clarity is something Nicola Sinclair and Roland Ulfstedt have witnessed firsthand, having both been in the defence sector for years, so they have joined forces to launch this key piece of research.
“The sector lacks basic data,” says Nicola, “the term defence and aerospace is no longer fit for purpose, and neither is government’s use of Small and Medium Enterprise (SME), which categorises together early-stage VC-backed companies with everything other than the Big 5. SME essentially just means ‘non-defence prime’.”
“Founders and investors can speak from their own experience but no one really has the data to support a more informed discussion, especially one that recognises the numbers will look different by stage, technology, geography, and of course over time. We want to address this,” says Roland.
If you are a founder building in this space, you can participate in the survey here. It will help lay foundations in data for us and others to talk about the defence and security tech sector. Please participate in the survey, and share it with others in the secto
