A wave of foreign-born defence companies is choosing the UK defence industry for its capital and its contracts, not for its combat record.
There was a time, not very long ago, when the UK defence industry meant a handful of familiar names, BAE Systems, QinetiQ, the slow multi-year churn of a Ministry of Defence procurement cycle that measured progress in years rather than months.
That world still exists, but it is no longer the only one.
Somewhere in the last eighteen months, a different kind of defence company started arriving in the UK and it did not grow up the way the old defence primes did. Well, it arrived already built, already tested, and often already valued in the billions, and it chose the UK, not because the UK built it but because the UK was where the capital and the contracts were suddenly gathering.
UFORCE is the clearest example of what that shift in the UK defence industry looks like from the inside.
The technology carrying its name, the drones, the unmanned boats, and the battlefield software, was forged from 2022 onward by nine Ukrainian teams working under the pressure of an actual invasion, iterating in months what a peacetime military might take years to learn.
The corporate entity that now owns that technology is a different, much younger thing, incorporated in London in January 2025, and it was this new London entity that raised fifty million dollars in March, led by Lakestar and Shield Capital, with PitchBook recording thirteen investors in total against the four the company has named publicly. Alongside the raise came a valuation north of a billion dollars, announced by the company itself and repeated everywhere since, a number we think is worth citing carefully rather than treating as independently confirmed, since we could not find it verified anywhere outside the company's own statement.
UFORCE is not travelling alone. Down in Fareham, a British company called Kraken Technology has spent the last few years building autonomous systems, including uncrewed maritime vessels, and this July it raised a hundred and seventy-five million dollars in its own round, backed by names as credible as the British Business Bank and the NATO Innovation Fund, and announced its own billion-dollar valuation in the process.
Tekever, headquartered in Lisbon rather than London, has taken a different route into the same moment, committing four hundred million pounds to expanding its sovereign manufacturing on British soil in pursuit of a Royal Air Force contract, betting that the UK is where the demand for its drones will keep growing fastest.
Three companies, three different origins, all converging on the UK defence industry at roughly the same time, and all doing it for the same underlying reason.
Why UK and Why Now?
That reason has a name, and it is the Strategic Defence Review, which was published last June. It promised the largest sustained increase in UK defence spending since the Cold War, and the Ministry of Defence now expects spending to climb to two point seven percent of GDP by 2027, with a Defence Investment Plan published at the end of June setting out exactly where that money is meant to land over the next decade.
When a government signals appetite on that scale, as the Strategic Defence Review did, capital tends to follow the signal, and companies with combat-proven technology but no fixed home have every reason to plant their flag wherever UK defence spending commitments are loudest and most recent.
The People Behind the Deals
It is worth noticing, too, who keeps showing up around these deals. Sir Ben Wallace sits on UFORCE's board, and this is not the only defence-tech door he has walked through since leaving the Ministry of Defence in 2023. He has also taken a partnership at a defence-focused investment fund, an advisory post with a firm working for the Saudi government, and a non-executive seat at a materials technology company, each one cleared by the government's own watchdog on business appointments, each time with conditions attached about lobbying and the use of privileged information.
None of this is improper, and the watchdog has said so every time. Still, it does tell you something about how tightly the people who used to run British defence policy are now woven into the companies hoping to sell back into it, and that thread runs through this entire UK defence industry, not just through one board seat.
What Britain Is Actually Building
What emerges, taken all together, is a UK defence industry being rebuilt from the outside.
The technology is often Ukrainian in origin or Portuguese in headquarters. The capital happens to be a mix of British public money, sovereign wealth adjacent funds, and venture firms that would not have gone near defence a decade ago.
The credibility, in more than one case, is being supplied by the very people who used to sit on the other side of the negotiating table. The UK is providing the address, the appetite, and increasingly the political cover, while the actual fighting and the actual innovation that only fighting seems to force, keeps happening somewhere else.
Whether that amounts to the UK building a defence industry of its own, or simply becoming the place where everyone else's defence industry comes to secure its next contract, is not a question this sector has had to answer yet.
Given how much money and how many familiar faces are now moving through it, we suspect it will not be able to avoid the question for much longer.
Also Read: HSBC, Shell, and Google Are Changing How UK Startups Raise Capital
This piece is based on secondary research.
Sources: PitchBook, GOV.UK (Advisory Committee on Business Appointments), UK Defence Journal, Sifted, Tech.eu, House of Commons Library, Bloomberg, 2026.
