In today’s ever-evolving technology landscape, startups have immense potential to make a difference in the defense and space sector. Startups, and the venture capital industry that finances them, are well placed to support the western defense efforts and to ensure the safety of our societies in face of difficult and serious global threats.
Unfortunately, this potential is often overlooked, and up until recent years, tech and venture capital companies had generally been reluctant to engage with defense establishments. In 2018, for example, thousands of Google employees wrote an extensive letter to their boss, Sundar Pichai, to object to the company’s involvement in a United States Department of Defense initiative, Project Maven.
Since then, however, there has been a dramatic shift in attitude towards government and defense projects. Companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Salesforce, have had to face protests from its employees, while the investment in aerospace and defense startups has been growing – having reached a record high of $7.6 billion in 2021.
Techstars, a venture capital firm, has enabled this shift in attitude with its active investments in the category. This year, the firm has made almost 100 investments in aerospace, defense, and space tech companies and 25% of the firms chosen by NASA for Small Business Innovation Research contracts were Techstars-backed companies.
Maëlle Gavet, the CEO of Techstars, is the perfect representative for this new era of tech and venture capital involvement in the defense ecosystem. Gavet has a wealth of experience, having previously been a senior executive in several large tech companies around the world.
Despite this progress, there is still much more work to be done in order to prevent the enemies of the West from surpassing our capabilities. From better computer vision technology to nuclear arsenals operating off of floppy disks, it is clear that the military is lagging behind in the tech world. But now startups have the chance to prepare the western world for the future so that it is both safe and secure.
