What Happened at the Future Forces Demonstration Day?

(10 – 11 October 2024), Advanced Manufacturing Training Centre (AMTC), Coventry

Future Forces (FF) is a not-for-profit organisation established by Brigadier Nick Cowley OBE, outgoing commander of the British Army’s prestigious 16 (Air Assault) Brigade. Its mission is to bring the best in Defence technology and equipment to the MOD’s front-line forces at speed and at scale. To do this the organisation seeks to bring together the MOD, early-stage Defence ‘startups,’ Defence ‘primes’ (the likes of BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, Babcock, and Airbus, as well as multinational technology companies such as Oracle and Amazon’s AWS), and venture capitalists. In bringing the four ecosystems together it hopes to stimulate conversation and encourage primes to augment startups’ innovative technology into existing UK Defence programmes, and in time, encourage primes to incorporate startups into future bids for UK Defence projects. This requirement stems from a perception in the Defence industry that UK MOD lacks the risk appetite to award projects to smaller organisations, and instead tends to take a safer approach by awarding work to primes, on whom they know they can depend, but which in turn could stifle innovation in the sector.

The event ran over two days, with delegates arriving for introductory briefs, dinner, a networking session, and a workshop designed to tease out action points for each of the four players within the Defence technology environment (i.e. the MOD, primes, startups, and VCs). The main event saw twenty startups take to the stage, or the ‘outdoor flight area,’ to provide an overview of their organisation, origin story and most importantly their product, with most of them providing a practical demonstration. For this, the first iteration of the event, the organisers sought products that solved the problems faced by UK frontline commands in the Sense, Decide and Effect technology areas. This saw a number of startups exhibiting their products in the following main areas:

Autonomous systems – wheeled, airborne, maritime
Robotics – land, underwater
Surveillance – AI-supported, real-time space derived
LLMs – use for Defence
UAS – AI piloting, heavy lift, anti-jamming, engineering
Secure communication

Key messages & takeaways:

The adoption of startups’ innovative products is being subdued by the MOD’s lack of risk appetite, with a perception that the organisation tends to prefer to award contracts to the primes rather than startups,
Primes in turn do not seek out startups often enough to incorporate their products in augmented deliverables to the MOD,
VCs can help, de-risking the use of startups in prime projects, by providing funding to startups, feeding further innovation,
Call for UK MOD to be more transparent with its future requirements so that the whole sector has a better understanding of where/what to innovate/develop,
A large part of what was demonstrated was related to the UAS section of the market, in part due to the underlying theme of the event (Sense, Decide & Effect), but goes to show how saturated it is,
Whilst there were some extremely interesting, innovative products on display, many of the startups exhibiting were particularly early stage (pre-seed funding, seed funding or pre-series A),
That said, it felt like a highly effective forum to get primes to engage with start ups to stimulate the Defence industry, fuel innovation, and support the delivery of technology and equipment to the front-line commands at speed and at scale.