DSEI 2025: Three challenges facing defence tech companies

Calibre Defence interviewed four DSEI 2025 exhibitors during an exclusive roundtable. In attendance was; Steve Wisotzki, EVP Government and Defense from Clearspeed, Al Bowman, General Manager – Defence & National Security at Mind Foundry,  Ben Packman, the Chief Strategy Officer at PQShield, and Toby Everitt, CEO of Metaverse VR. 

In the 1980s as NATO states began designing and manufacturing some of the most advanced systems that they had ever fielded, software was an enabler. Sure, the F-16 could not fly without its software, which empowered 45% of the aircraft’s operations. But the development was significant for its cost-effective design, versatility, and agility – not so much the software it carried. Throughout the early 2000s, however, this began to change. 

Now, software provides critical capabilities, both those that are new – like condensing video footage into metadata to be transmitted over a limited comms network – and replace other elements that once required human input. For example, synthetic training environments provide a safe, and in some cases more realistic, alternative to live training for military systems. Software can help establish which sounds detected by a sonar are a Russian submarine, and it can also create bridges between legacy systems that were never built to work together. In the 1980s and through to the early 2000s, all of these capabilities relied on hardware improvements with software enabling its operation, and the success or failure largely dependent upon the training and competence of the human operator. 

Software is increasingly defining defence, and this has led to the development and growth of the DSEI Tech Zone. The Tech Zone is designed to provide companies working in AI, data, cloud services, and cyber security amongst others with a specialist zone to meet like-minded individuals and potential customers. At DSEI 2025, it will host a range of new companies, as well as established players providing unique services and capabilities. Calibre Defence met with four exhibitors in this year’s Tech Zone to find out more about the roles that they play, the opportunities they see, and the challenges that they face. The companies cover a range of expertise from post-quantum encryption through to AI-enabled drone detection, determining risk from a person’s voice, and building synthetic training environments. 

Turning the tanker and the role of technology

The UK’s Strategic Defence Review includes the word “technology” 86 times and the rapid advances in technology are pitched as critical components of the UK’s armed forces over the next decade. The review emphasises both the necessity of harnessing technology, and doing so quickly, with lines like: 

“Armed Forces that do not change at the same pace as technology quickly risk becoming obsolete,” 

 

And: 

“Defence must fundamentally change how it fights and how it supports that fight: rapidly increasing the Armed Forces’ lethality and enhancing their ability to fight at the leading edge of technology.”

These statements appear reasonable, as does the call to action – adopt emerging and developing technologies faster, or risk becoming obsolete. All four speakers felt, however, that the MoD could move faster and more decisively in its interactions with tech companies. “Unless defence gets really actively involved in looking at how it is going to solve problems using technology, it may find it hard to turn that technology around to its benefit if it’s not engaged early enough,” Ben Packman, Chief Strategy Officer at PQShield said. 

Ben’s focus on early engagement with technology is interesting, it highlights the benefits of close cooperation between the commercial world and that of defence. There are a number of companies that work together with businesses in the commercial world to provide solutions for defence; Anduril and Helsing are two fairly well-known examples, but others like Clearspeed, represented on the panel by Steve Wisotzki, started in defence and have moved to the commercial world, helping insurance companies to detect potentially fraudulent claims. “The stakes are really high, the volatility throughout the world is growing significantly, so we need to use technology…we want to be able to trust and empower humans to make their jobs more efficient and accurate,” Steve explained. This shows that the benefits can go both ways, but the pace of the defence world is often recognised to be behind the commercial. 

Al Bowman, General Manager of Defence & National Security at Mind Foundry added that “there is a danger that this technology will overtake the pace that defence is operating at and make redundant a lot of the assumptions we’ve made about the world.” This is certainly true for AI, which is rarely deployed in the ideal state as most algorithms and models are trained on synthetic data. Real operational data is required to fully empower those models, without which they will never reach their full potential. This means that there is genuinely an advantage to being a fast adopter, and the effects of failing to rapidly seize the opportunities that technologies create may be dire. “I do think we need to get our skates on, machine learning and AI is moving fast, and our future adversaries will be very quick to exploit our vulnerabilities and gaps,” Al continued. 

“They definitely need a mechanism to make the most of what is out there, and that is what SMEs provide. But we often procure to a requirement, which means we focus on last year’s problems,” Toby Everitt, CEO of Metaverse VR added. This is a perennial challenge raised by defence companies, especially in the UK, where user requirements might be drawn up over months, leading to a procurement timeline that takes years before the end user sees any equipment. This can mean that the system has to be updated almost as soon as it enters service. “I think the focus has to be on identification of the next generation of technologies, and being able to draw them in at speed,” Toby continued, returning neatly to a point first raised by Ben. Across all four panellists, they focused on the importance of early engagement and rapid procurement for technology as being key, not just to extract the most value from new capabilities, but also to ensure that it actually delivers a competitive advantage. This is perhaps something that DSEI 2025 will grapple with, too. 

The tanker of the British MoD and others is slowly beginning to turn in the direction of rapid procurement, and the UK appears to have set itself the target of leading the way. At the leading edge of its forces, the “Digital Targeting Web”, which many may previously have known as the kill web, is expected to connect any sensor to any effector, allowing better decisions and weapon to target matching to be made. The British MoD has also gained valuable experience of rapid procurement through its support to Ukraine, providing drones that meet Ukrainian needs at the pace of evolution on that particular battlefield. So, there is reason to be hopeful that the recommendations from the SDR will translate into capability, sooner rather than later. 

DSEI 2025: Enabling the future force

The theme for DSEI 2025 is focused around enabling the future force, which is also very much the core of the Strategic Defence Review, which includes an overview of enduring horizon capabilities like the UK’s nuclear deterrent, as well as more immediate needs. All four panellists have products that can contribute to preparing the future force, and most of them are also engaged in building the current force. 

“We’ve had some really good testing with the UK special forces,” Steve explained, adding that, “we have integrated our product into the technology that the operators have in their hands in a seamless API kind of way. Now our product can augment the screening process that they are currently doing,” The Clearspeed product uses slight tells in the human voice to assess whether or not they are a risk to the individuals or organisation screening them. It was developed during the war in Afghanistan after a friend of the founder was killed in a green on blue incident, which revealed some flaws in the screening process for entrants into the Afghan commandos. The Clearspeed product is designed to “get to trust faster,” Steve explained, further adding that its capabilities are sometimes hard to believe.

From slight nuances in the human voice, to the unique fingerprints of the sounds made by drones and submarines, Al explained that Mind Foundry sees its place in the digestion and comprehension of masses of data. “If you look at the next generation of aircraft, submarines, or satellites, they will be picking up orders of magnitude more data. More refined data, more different types of data, and the ability to process that has declined if anything.” This is a long-known issue within defence and Toby even recounted his own experience in Afghanistan to emphasise the point, “I remember flying with just a digital camera for hours on end, and they told me there was just one person to trawl through it all, and they never managed it.” Here, AI has a lot of potential to offer the future force, and will have an important role to play in the UK’s Digital Targeting Web. “I think our contribution to the future force is creating greater value from that data. And unless you invest in machine learning and give it time to mature, you’re just going to be overwhelming a smaller number of exquisitely trained operators trying to make sense of it all,” Al explained.

Metaverse VR provides virtual training products and digital twins, as well as a range of other services and capabilities. This has included immersive simulation in the subsurface space, allowing crews to familiarise themselves with the platforms before ever stepping foot on them. “We also identified that with the proliferation of drones, there was a new need for effective training. The drones that the UK is buying cost anything up to £50,000 each, so they can’t be thrown away,” Toby explained. “So we have built a digital twin of some of these drones that replicates the flight characteristics more realistically.” This allows testing and evaluation to be done in a synthetic environment without endangering the drones themselves. Digital twins and synthetic training have been put forward as critical elements of delivering the Strategic Defence Review. In part because the UK lacks the training estate to properly test its forces and deploy them at scale, but also because the costs and risks of live training can be very high.

Ben focused on information security and encryption, “transferring all of this data needs to happen more and more in real time, which likely means more open communication networks,” he explained. Many forces are already experimenting with 5G and types of encrypted messenger apps to share data between units, which provides an additional form of communications alongside traditional radio networks. That encryption would be resistant to current computers, but not quantum computers, which are most likely to be realised by state actors, he said. “As we have heard here, there are so many potential benefits to leveraging technology, in terms of speed and accuracy, it would be a shame if security was an afterthought,” Ben said.  

Building the right team 

Part of the challenge with a lot of technology and software, is that it lacks a tangible element that humans can inspect and understand. However, as the four panellists have made clear, their products would provide benefits to the future and current force throughout the value chain. At the same time, they all emphasised the challenges they have faced with securing the right kind of talent. Specialists in AI are key for defence, but the salaries are rarely anywhere close to those offered in Silicon Valley. Steve noted that Clearspeed’s commercial success had brought private backers to the company, “now we have the luxury of screening our own talent and getting the right people in our team,” he said. Al and Toby both emphasised their close relationships with the UK’s universities, as well as the halo effect of private capital seeing greater opportunities in defence. “If the MoD can generate the right demand signal, then more private capital will come, and colleges and universities will start to produce more graduates with the skills that the UK needs,” Al suggested. “We have a really good and diverse talent pool across the UK, but we’ve had to work hard at it,” Toby said, speaking to Metaverse’s own experience of building the right team. 

On private capital, Ben cautioned however that there is more the MoD could do, “It is difficult for a small organisation to stay committed and engaged because MoD projects can go on for a long time, and the decision criteria is sometimes unclear,” he said, echoing sentiments from many others within the defence ecosystem. Ben suggested that transparency around those things, as well as the point at which a decision will be made, would be very helpful to smaller companies. “We can all manage a runway, we can all find funding. The question is, how expensive is that funding to the founders or the people within that business?” Greater transparency from the MoD could help reduce uncertainty and the risk profile of private equity investments, which could give founders a stronger position during negotiations. All of this together connects to provide the right environment for recruiting and nourishing the talent pool that the UK needs for its technology-led defence reforms. 

Calibre comment

From this brief discussion with four innovative companies that will be found in the DSEI 2025 Tech Zone, it can be seen that there is belief in the opportunity presented by defence. Enabling the future and current force is something they are ready to do, providing that the right signal is provided and the contracts are placed. However, they highlight the need for speed – often referred to as “pace” or “agility” within MoD communications. Put simply, the sooner western armed forces adopt and seek to exploit emerging technology, the more they stand to gain from using it and the sooner the potential benefits will be realised. And, to a certain extent, the pace of adoption goes hand-in-hand with economic growth and the development of a healthy talent pool that can support the application of technology to defence. 

By Sam Cranny-Evans, published on 12th June, 2025. The lead image shows two sailors working with a virtual reality simulator. The £27m investment in partnership with Team Fisher, (a consortium of partners led by Capita which delivers shore-based training for the Royal Navy) and Metaverse VR, is intended to make learning navigation and running a bridge more realistic, better and potentially faster. Credit: LPhot Daniel Bladen/UK MOD © Crown copyright 2024.

DSEI 2025: Tech Zone profiles

If you would like to learn more about the panellists in this interview and the companies they represent, take a look at the brief profiles below, including links to their company websites and LinkedIn profiles. 

Clearspeed, Steve Wisotzki, EVP Government and Defense

Clearspeed was founded in 2016 to provide voice-based assessments of risk. The company’s technology provides an indication, based on a short phone questionnaire, of the level of risk that a person might pose to an organisation. This could be to counter insurance fraud, for example, or to indicate whether an individual poses a risk to deployed troops. Upon retirement from the Navy in 2014, Steve relocated to New York City where he led the Global Security Team for JPMorgan Chase until 2019.

Website: Clearspeed
LinkedIn: Steve W. – Government, Defense & Security – Clearspeed | LinkedIn

Mind Foundry, Al Bowman, General Manager – Defence & National Security

Mind Foundry, an Oxford University spin out, empowers organisations with AI built to tackle high-stakes, real-world problems. Its defence and national security business unit works to help open, democratic societies use AI responsibly by building Machine Learning solutions to interpret and process complex signals to support counter-UAS, maritime and other missions. Al has over 30 years of experience in both AI and military operations, from working in organisations such as Dataminr and Deloitte and spending many years in the Armed Forces. 

Website: Mind Foundry
LinkedIn: Al Bowman – Mind Foundry | LinkedIn 

PQShield, Ben Packman, Chief Strategy Officer

PQShield is a global leader in post-quantum cryptography, which refers to a new generation of cryptographic algorithms designed to withstand attacks from future quantum computers. Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) has been standardised by NIST and is being mandated by governments and industrial bodies globally – there is a 5 to 10 year window to migrate. PQShield delivers real-world, high-quality secure implementations of quantum-safe cryptography in software, FPGA and ASIC, as well as being a leading contributor to post-quantum cryptography standardization projects around the world. Ben has 7 years experience with PQC, advising governments and organisations globally, on top of 30 years of experience in technology, health, media, and telecoms, and experience advising multiple startups in the UK tech space.

Website:  PQShield
LinkedIn: Ben Packman – PQShield | LinkedIn 

Metaverse VR, Toby Everitt, CEO 

Metaverse VR is a consultancy and software development company that provides synthetic training environments, augmented reality, and synthetic design and delivery. The company has developed and delivered an immersive walk-through simulator for the Royal Navy’s submarine crew training programme. Toby has an extensive background in defence with over 10 years of defence consultancy. Toby also served in both the Army and the Royal Navy as a rotary and fixed wing pilot for 24 years. 

Website:  Metaverse VR
LinkedIn: Toby Everitt FRAeS – CEO, Founder – Metaverse-VR Ltd | LinkedIn