Working with Defence & Security Report
The Working with Defence & Security Report is an independent, founder-led annual report. Drawing on data from founders across diverse technology areas and geographies, we examine what it’s really like for startups and scaleups building and selling in this sector today.
The Working with Defence & Security Report is the first founder-led dataset mapping how today’s startups build, scale and work with customers across the defence and security community in NATO and allied nations. Now in its second year, the 2025 edition draws on direct insights from early and growth-stage teams across the UK, Europe, the Nordics, the Balkans and the United States.
This year’s findings highlight a fundamental shift that has taken place in the sector. Many contributors founded their companies after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The data shows the arrival of a new generation of defence innovators, VC-backed teams with fundamentally different assumptions about speed, capital and adoption compared with the traditional defence-industrial base. These two parts of the ecosystem are now operating with entirely different rhythms and under different constraints.
The report examines how founders secure early traction, navigate procurement and confront structural bottlenecks. It also challenges long-held assumptions about the “Valley of Death,” contract stickiness and the role trusted capital plays in early product market fit.
Our aim is to provide founders, investors and policymakers with a clear evidence base, and a shared language, for better decisions in a sector where technology, policy and security are increasingly interlinked and fundamental to our collective defence.
