Defense Tech Sector Research: Building a View from Scratch

Yagini was asked to assess the defense tech sector for Stride, at a point when the team had no established view on it. The brief was simple: defense tech is gaining traction in UK and Europe, understand how the sector stacks up.

Because the space is niche and technical, she recognized that the structure needed to do more work than a standard sector deck. She built the output around what a new audience would need to understand, starting with a quick snapshot of the sector, then breaking it into sub-sectors and explaining each one in accessible terms: what an autonomous drone startup does, what a simulation company is actually building, and why these are distinct from one another.

She then built a usage matrix mapping where each sub-sector fits within the current market, and traced the shift in how warfare has evolved, from ground-based to air-based and remote-controlled operations, to explain why capital is now flowing into the space and what that means for a fund like Stride.

In parallel, she was the primary analyst on a deal involving a deep-tech London-based startup that did not fit neatly into any existing sector. The company had started as a gaming business and had identified a potential application in defense tech through spatial computing-based simulation. She went deep into the underlying technology, working through videos, technical documentation, and the company's website to understand what the product actually did.

From that analysis, she formed an independent view: that simulation within defense tech, particularly low-energy simulation that does not require supercomputing infrastructure, was a significant and underappreciated opportunity. She identified applications beyond defense, including digital twins and natural disaster risk modeling.