Focus Area
Defence & Dual-Use
Technologies with a commercial buyer and a defence buyer, where the underlying engineering is substantially the same and the difference is assurance, supply chain and who is permitted to hold the data. The fund treats dual-use as a question about demand, not a label — the commercial side has to stand on its own.
What we back.
- Security for operational technology
- Protecting control systems rather than corporate IT: passive monitoring of industrial protocols, segmentation, and integrity claims about a plant or a network the customer cannot take offline to test.
- Autonomy and robotics
- Ground, maritime and aerial platforms whose navigation, perception and safety stacks are shared between a commercial site and a defence one; the differentiator is operation in degraded conditions — no satellite fix, no link, heat, dust, an operator who is not an engineer.
- Sensing and signal processing
- Radio-frequency, acoustic, optical and multispectral sensing, where the durable asset is usually the processing chain, the calibration discipline and the signature library rather than the sensor itself.
- Secure and resilient communications
- Mesh and low-visibility links, key management, and networks engineered to degrade gracefully under interference instead of failing closed — increasingly a requirement for civil infrastructure too.
Why now
Why this sector, in this corridor, now.
The buying behaviour has changed more than the technology has. Defence and critical-infrastructure customers are procuring software-defined capability on shorter cycles, from suppliers who are not traditional primes, and the cost curve on autonomy and sensing now favours systems that are numerous and replaceable over a handful of exquisite ones. Commercial components carry most of that stack; the engineering that remains hard is assurance, integration and supply-chain provenance.
The Gulf is building domestic defence-industrial capacity rather than importing finished systems, with local manufacture, local content and transfer of engineering skill written into how procurement is structured. For a company with a working commercial product, that is a route in as a partner in building capability — a very different position from selling a box from overseas, and a much harder one to displace.
What we look for
What a company in this area has to show.
The five criteria in thethesisapply to every opportunity. These are the questions this area adds on top of them.
A commercial business that stands without the defence line
Defence should widen the buyer set and lengthen the contract. A company whose entire pipeline is a single government customer is running a programme, and it should be financed like one.
Export control understood before the term sheet
Classification, end-use restrictions and the licensing route for each target market are first-meeting diligence, not post-close cleanup. A cross-border structure built before anyone checked what may lawfully move is expensive to unwind.
Evidence the system degrades well
Measured performance under the conditions the customer actually has — interference, heat, dust, intermittent connectivity, imperfect maintenance — rather than a clean demonstration on a good day.
Assurance treated as engineering
Where the product will need a safety case, a security accreditation or traceable component provenance, that is designed in from the architecture. Teams that plan to add it after product-market fit generally rebuild instead.
Across the corridor
Why the corridor matters here.
This is the area where the corridor is a compliance problem before it is a commercial one, and that is precisely why it is worth doing properly. Technical companies commonly reach the region through intermediaries paid to introduce rather than to operate, which produces meetings and rarely produces a programme; regional buyers, meanwhile, increasingly want a local entity, local staff, local build and a genuine transfer of capability. Closing that distance means mapping the licensing route and the permitted scope of transfer first, then structuring the entity, the staffing and the data handling around what is actually allowed. The fund is built to do that work before a deal rather than discover it afterwards — and to say no where the answer is that nothing may lawfully move.
What that support consists of in practice is set out underCapital + Capability, and how the two markets are covered underPlatform.
Next
Building in Defence & Dual-Use?
Founders in the United States and the GCC can submit an opportunity for review, or read the five areas together.